Related papers: Melting transitions in biomembranes
When DNA molecules are heated they denature. This occurs locally so that loops of molten single DNA strands form, connected by intact double-stranded DNA pieces. The properties of this "melting" transition have been intensively…
Experiments and theory have shown that cell monolayers and epithelial tissues exhibit solid-liquid and glass-liquid transitions. These transitions are biologically relevant to our understanding of embryonic development, wound healing, and…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
Folding and aggregation of proteins, the interaction between proteins and membranes, as well as the adsorption of organic soft matter to inorganic solid substrates belong to the most interesting challenges in understanding structure and…
The relation between thermal fluctuations and the mechanical response of a free membrane has been explored in great detail, both theoretically and experimentally. However, understanding this relationship for membranes, locally pinned by…
From the perspective of physical properties, the cell membrane is an exotic two-dimensional material that has a dual nature: it exhibits characteristics of fluids, i.e., lipid molecules show lateral diffusion, while also demonstrating…
Most biological molecules contain acido-basic groups that modulate their structure and interactions. A consequence is that pH gradients, local heterogeneities and dynamic variations are used by cells and organisms to drive or regulate…
The lateral diffusion of lipids within membrane is of paramount importance, serving as a central mechanism in numerous physiological processes including cell signaling, membrane trafficking, protein activity regulation, and energy…
Melting is often understood in purely equilibrium terms, where crystalline order disappears once the free energy of the solid equals that of the liquid. Yet at the microscopic level, the initiating events for melting can often be traced to…
We consider the formation of finite-size domains in lipid bilayers consisting of saturated and hybrid lipids. First, we describe a monolayer model that includes a coupling between a compositional scalar field and a two-dimensional vectorial…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
We revisit the one-dimensional ferromagnetic Ising spin-chain with a finite number of spins and periodic boundaries and derive analytically and verify numerically its various stationary and dynamical properties at different temperatures. In…
The phase diagram of an incompressible fluid membrane subject to quantum and thermal fluctuations is calculated exactly in a large number of dimensions of configuration space. At zero temperature, a crumpling transition is found at a…
We investigate pores in fluid membranes by molecular dynamics simulations of an amphiphile-solvent mixture, using a molecular coarse-grained model. The amphiphilic membranes self-assemble into a lamellar stack of amphiphilic bilayers…
Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this…
Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics.…
Integral membrane proteins deform the surrounding bilayer creating long-ranged forces that influence distant proteins. These forces can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the proteins' shape, height, contact angle with the bilayer, as…
It is well known that at the gel-liquid phase transition temperature a lipid bilayer membrane exhibits an increased ion permeability. We analyze the quantized currents in which the increased permeability presents itself. The open time…
The extent to which biological interfaces affect the dynamics of water plays a key role in the exchange of matter and chemical interactions that are essential for life. The density and the mobility of water molecules depend on their…