Related papers: Water between membranes: Structure and Dynamics
The complex interplay between the various attractive and repulsive forces that mediate between biological membranes governs an astounding array of biological functions: cell adhesion, membrane fusion, self-assembly, binding-unbinding…
Experiments and computer simulations have established that liquid water's surfaces can deviate in important ways from familiar bulk behavior. Even in the simplest case of an air-water interface, distinctive layering, orientational biases,…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
The magnitude of the pH of the surface of water continues to be a contentious topic in the physical chemistry of aqueous interfaces. Recent theoretical studies have shown little or no preference for the proton to be at the surface compared…
Nanoscale confinement of molecules in a fluid can result in enhanced viscosity, local fluidic order, or collective motion. Confinement also affects ion transport and/or the rate and equilibrium concentration in a chemical reaction, all of…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
The results of molecular dynamics simulations of the properties of water in an aqueous ionic solution close to an interface with a model metallic electrode are described. In the simulations the electrode behaves as an ideally polarizable…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…
Nonequilibrium dynamics of biomembranes with active inclusions is considered. The inclusions represent protein molecules which perform cyclic internal conformational motions driven by the energy brought with ATP ligands. As protein…
The peculiar structuring of liquid water stems from a fine-tuned molecular principle embodying the two different interaction demands of the water molecule: The formation of hydrogen bonds or the compensation for coordination defects. Here…
The dynamics of membrane undulations inside a viscous solvent is governed by distinctive, anomalous, power laws. Inside a viscoelastic continuous medium these universal behaviors are modified by the specific bulk viscoelastic spectrum. Yet,…
In our recent works, based on the structural studies on water and interfacial water (topmost water layer at the solute/water interface), hydration free energy is derived and utilized to investigate the physical origin of hydrophobic…
We investigate the curvature-dependence of water dynamics in the vicinity of hydrophobic spherical solutes using molecular dynamics simulations. For both, the lateral and perpendicular diffusivity as well as for H-bond kinetics of water in…
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…
Turbulence is ubiquitous in plasmas, leading to rich dynamics characterized by irregularity, irreversibility, energy fluctuations across many scales, and energy transfer across many scales. Another fundamental and generic feature of…
In these lectures I discuss long-scale properties of fluctuating polymerized membranes in the presence of network anisotropy and random heterogeneities. Amazingly, even infinitesimal amount of these seemingly innocuous but physically…
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…
Liquid water, besides being fundamental for life on Earth, has long fascinated scientists due to several anomalies. Different hypotheses have been put forward to explain these peculiarities. The most accredited one foresees the presence in…
Despite the simplicity of its molecular unit, water is a challenging system because of its uniquely rich polymorphism and predicted but yet unconfirmed features. Introducing a novel space of generalized coordinates that capture changes in…