Related papers: Structural symmetry and membrane curvature sensing
The unique structural properties of interfacial water are at the heart of a vast range of important processes in electrochemistry, climate science, and biophysics. At interfaces, water molecules exhibit preferential orientations and an…
The use of reduced models for investigating the self-assembly dynamics underlying protein shell formation in spherical viruses is described. The spontaneous self-assembly of these polyhedral, supramolecular structures, in which icosahedral…
The Unfolded Protein Response is the cell mechanism for maintaining the balance of properly folded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum , the specialized cellular compartment. Although it is largely studied from a biological point of view,…
The structural dynamics of macromolecules is important for most microbiological processes, from protein folding to the origins of neurodegenerative disorders. Noninvasive measurements of these dynamics are highly challenging. Recently,…
Autophagy is an intracellular degradation process that employs complex membrane dynamics to isolate and break down cellular components. However, many unanswered questions remain concerning remodeling of autophagic membranes. Here, we focus…
A cell membrane can be simply regarded as composite material consisting of lipid bilayer, membrane cytoskeleton beneath lipid bilayer, and proteins embedded in lipid bilayer and linked with membrane cytoskeleton if one only concerns its…
We consider membranes as fluid deformable surface and allow for higher order geometric terms in the bending energy. The evolution equations are derived and numerically solved using surface finite elements. The higher order geometric terms…
We use theory and numerical computation to determine the shape of an axisymmetric fluid membrane with a resistance to bending and constant area. The membrane connects two rings in the classic geometry that produces a catenoidal shape in a…
We study closed liquid membranes that segregate into three phases due to differences in the chemical and physical properties of its components. The shape and in-plane membrane arrangement of the phases are coupled through phase-specific…
Gaining access to the cell interior is fundamental for many applications, such as electrical recording, drug and biomolecular delivery. A very promising technique consists of culturing cells on nano/micro pillars. The tight adhesion and…
In a similar way in which the folding of single--domain proteins provide an important test in the study of self--organization, the folding of homodimers constitute a basic challenge in the quest for the mechanisms which are at the basis of…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
The deformation of cellular membranes regulates trafficking processes, such as exocytosis and endocytosis. Classically, the Helfrich continuum model is used to characterize the forces and mechanical parameters that cells tune to accomplish…
Cells contain elaborate and interconnected networks of protein polymers which make up the cytoskeleton. The cytoskeleton governs the internal positioning and movement of vesicles and organelles, and controls dynamic changes in cell…
Scattering structure factors provide essential insight into material properties and are routinely obtained in experiments, computer simulations, and theoretical analyses. Different approaches favor different geometries of the material. In…
Protein aggregation in cell membrane is vital for the majority of biological functions. Recent experimental results suggest that transmembrane domains of proteins such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets have different structural…
Compressing or cooling a fluid typically enhances its static interparticle correlations. However, there are notable exceptions. Isothermal compression can reduce the translational order of fluids that exhibit anomalous waterlike trends in…
The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that…
The prediction of pressure and flow distributions inside porous membranes is important if the geometry deviates from single-bore tubular geometries. This task remains challenging, especially when considering local porosity variations caused…
In nature the three-dimensional structure of a protein is encoded in the corresponding gene. In this paper we describe a new method for encoding the three-dimensional structure of a protein into a binary sequence. The feature of the method…