Related papers: Thermodynamically Driven Assemblies and Liquid-liq…
Cell division is an essential biological process, and regulation of cell division is of relevance for many important fields of biology and medicine. Introducing exogenous substances, such as nanoparticles, into the nucleus, has been…
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
The bipolar organization of the microtubule-based mitotic spindle is essential for the faithful segregation of chromosomes in cell division. Despite our extensive knowledge of genes and proteins, the physical mechanism of how the ensemble…
Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…
The energy landscape dictates pathways and outcomes in supramolecular selfassembly, yet harnessing it from the nano to the macro scales remains a major challenge. Here, we demonstrate liquid liquid phase separation (LLPS) as a powerful tool…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
Active systems, or active matter, are self-driven systems which live, or function, far from equilibrium - a paradigmatic example which we focus on here is provided by a suspension of self-motile particles. Active systems are far from…
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…
Microphase separation is common in active biological systems as exemplified by the separation of RNA and DNA-rich phases in the cell nucleus driven by the transcriptional activity of polymerase enzymes acting similarly to amphiphiles in a…
We review understanding of kinetics of fluid phase separation in various space dimensions. Morphological differences, percolating or disconnected, based on overall composition in a binary liquid or density in a vapor-liquid system, have…
Phase separation of a liquid mixture embedded within an elastic network is relevant to a wide range of natural and industrial systems, including biomolecular condensates interacting with the cytoskeleton, structural colouring in bird…
Many biological processes are supported by special molecules, called motor proteins or molecular motors, that transport cellular cargoes along linear protein filaments and can reversibly associate to their tracks. Stimulated by these…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
A number of novel experimental and theoretical results have recently been obtained on active soft matter, demonstrating the various interesting universal and anomalous features of this kind of driven systems. Here we consider a fundamental…
Biomolecular condensates provide distinct chemical environments, which control various cellular processes. The diffusive dynamics and chemical kinetics inside phase-separated condensates can be studied experimentally by fluorescently…
Spontaneous phase separation, or demixing, is important in biological phenomena such as cell sorting. In particle-based models, an open question is whether differences in diffusivity can drive such demixing. While…
Understanding the thermodynamics of the duplication process is a fundamental step towards a comprehensive physical theory of biological systems. However, the immense complexity of real cells obscures the fundamental tensions between energy…
Segregation of different cell types is a crucial process for the pattern formation in tissues, in particular during embryogenesis. Since the involved cell interactions are complex and difficult to measure individually in experiments,…
Phase segregation triggered by selective evaporation can emerge in multicomponent systems, leading to complex physiochemical hydrodynamics. Recently, Li et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 120, 2018, 224501) and Kim & Stone (J. Fluid Mech., vol.…
As for many motile micro-algae, the freshwater species Chlamydomonas reinhardtii can detect light sources and adapt its motile behavior in response. Here, we show that suspensions of photophobic cells can be unstable to density…