Related papers: Structural symmetry and membrane curvature sensing
Biological membranes are host to proteins and molecules which may form domain-like structures resulting in spatially-varying material properties. Vesicles with such heterogeneous membranes can exhibit intricate shapes at equilibrium and…
The understanding of dynamics and functioning of biological membranes and in particular of membrane embedded proteins is one of the most fundamental problems and challenges in modern biology and biophysics. In particular the impact of…
Deep learning is catalyzing a scientific revolution fueled by big data, accessible toolkits, and powerful computational resources, impacting many fields including protein structural modeling. Protein structural modeling, such as predicting…
Inferring the structural properties of a protein from its amino acid sequence is a challenging yet important problem in biology. Structures are not known for the vast majority of protein sequences, but structure is critical for…
The biological function of membranes is closely related to their softness, which is often studied through the membranes' thermally-driven fluctuations. The analysis commonly assumes that the relaxation rate of a pure bending deformation is…
Cell shape changes are largely controlled by the actin cytoskeleton, a dynamic filament network beneath the plasma membrane. Several cell types can form extended free-standing protrusions not supported by an extracellular substrate or…
Self-assembly of protein monomers into distinct membrane protein oligomers provides a general mechanism for diversity in the molecular architectures, and resulting biological functions, of membrane proteins. We develop a general physical…
Using analytical calculations and computer simulations we consider both the lateral diffusion of a membrane protein and the fluctuation spectrum of the membrane in which the protein is embedded. The membrane protein interacts with the…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
The adhesion of cell membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. In this article, we review recent results from simulations and theory that lead to novel insights on how the binding equilibrium…
In the framework of a phase field model of a single cell crawling on a substrate, we investigate how the properties of the cell membrane affect the shape and motility of the cell. Since the membrane influences the cell dynamics on multiple…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
Membrane proteins deform the surrounding lipid bilayer, which can lead to membrane-mediated interactions between neighboring proteins. Using the mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) as a model system, we demonstrate how the…
Understanding protein folding has been one of the great challenges in biochemistry and molecular biophysics. Over the past 50 years, many thermodynamic and kinetic studies have been performed addressing the stability of globular proteins.…
Computational elucidation of membrane protein (MP) structures is challenging partially due to lack of sufficient solved structures for homology modeling. Here we describe a high-throughput deep transfer learning method that first predicts…
A model describing cell membranes as optimal shapes with regard to the $L^2$-deficit of their mean curvature to a given constant called spontaneous curvature is considered. It is shown that the corresponding energy functional is lower…
Soft interfaces formed by lipid membranes are fundamental to living cells, synthetic cells, and membrane-based soft materials. However, a quantitative framework linking molecular organization with nonlinear interfacial mechanics remains…
Brain representations of curvature may be formed on the basis of either vision or touch. Experimental and theoretical work by the author and her colleagues has shown that the processing underlying such representations directly depends on…
Morphological change of bilayer membrane in vivo is not a spontaneous procedure but modulated by various types of proteins in general. Most of these modulations are associated with the localization of related proteins in the crowded lipid…