Related papers: Segregative phase separation scenario of the forma…
In living cells, proteins involved in specialized biochemical functions are often spatially organized within biomolecular condensates. Increasing evidence suggests that some of these condensates, including DNA repair condensates, emerge…
This article presents a physical biology approach to understanding organization and segregation of bacterial chromosomes. The author uses a "piston" analogy for bacterial chromosomes in a cell, which leads to a phase diagram for the…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
In many biopolymer solutions, attractive interactions that stabilize finite-sized clusters at low concentrations also promote phase separation at high concentrations. Here we study a model biopolymer system that exhibits the opposite…
Biomolecular condensates are liquid- or gel-like droplets of proteins and nucleic acids formed at least in part through liquid-liquid phase separation. Condensates enable diverse functions of cells and the pathogens that infect them,…
Inspired by recent experiments on the effects of cytosolic crowders on the organization of bacterial chromosomes, we consider a "feather-boa" type model chromosome in the presence of non-additive crowders, encapsulated within a cylindrical…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Entropic repulsion between DNA ring polymers under confinement is the key mechanism governing the spatial segregation of bacterial chromosomes, although it remains incompletely understood how proteins aid the process of entropic…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
We characterize the equilibrium thermodynamics of a thick polymer confined in a spherical region of space. This is used to gain insight into the DNA packaging process. The experimental reference system for the present study is the recent…
Cells operate in part by compartmentalizing chemical reactions. For example, recent work has shown that chromatin, the material that contains the cell's genome, can auto-regulate its structure by utilizing reaction products (proteins, RNA)…
Fractionation is necessary for self-assembly in multicomponent mixtures. Here, reversible fractionation and crystallization are realized and studied in a two-dimensional binary colloids which is supersaturated by enhancing the attraction…
The interaction of phase-separating systems with chemical reactions is of great interest in various contexts, from biology to material science. In biology, phase separation is thought to be the driving force behind the formation of…
Adding a non-adsorbing polymer to passive colloids induces an attraction between the particles via the `depletion' mechanism. High enough polymer concentrations lead to phase separation. We combine experiments, theory and simulations to…
The segregation of plasmids in a bacterial population is investigated. Hereby, a dynamical model is formulated in terms of a size-structured population using a hyperbolic partial differential equation incorporating non-local terms (the…
While experiments and computer simulations to study biological phenomena are usually performed in diluted in vitro conditions, such phenomena happen inside the cell, an environment densely packed with diverse macromolecules. Here, we revise…
The possibility of prescribing local interactions between nano- and microscopic components that direct them to assemble in a predictable fashion is a central goal of nanotechnology research. In this article we advance a new paradigm in…