Related papers: Dynamics of particle uptake at cell membranes
The basic process of the innate immune system when phagocyte (white blood cell) engulf or swallow a target particle (bacterium or dead cell), is called phagocytosis. We apply the phase field approach in the spirit of [1], that couples the…
Phase-separated biomolecular condensates with liquid-like properties play a key role in the organization and compartmentalization of the intracellular environment. Condensate-mediated capillary forces acting on membranes drive…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
Cellular uptake of nanoplastics is instrumental in their environmental accumulation and transfer to humans through the food chain. Despite extensive studies using spherical plastic nanoparticles, the influence of the morphological…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
Phagocytosis is the fundamental cellular process by which eukaryotic cells bind and engulf particles by their cell membrane. Particle engulfment involves particle recognition by cell-surface receptors, signaling and remodeling of the actin…
Phagocytosis is the process of engulfment and internalization of comparatively large particles by the cell, that plays a central role in the functioning of our immune system. We study the process of phagocytosis by considering a simplified…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
The accumulation of self-propelled particles on repulsive barriers is a widely observed feature in active matter. Despite being implicated in a broad range of biological processes, from biofilm formation to cytoskeletal movement, wetting of…
The space-time dynamics of rigid inhomogeneities (inclusions) free to move in a randomly fluctuating fluid bio-membrane is derived and numerically simulated as a function of the membrane shape changes. Both vertically placed (embedded)…
The present study focuses on the receptor driven endocytosis typical of viral entry into a cell. A locally increased density of receptors at the time of contact between the cell and the virus is necessary in this case. The virus is…
The cellular uptake of self-propelled nanoparticles (NPs) or viruses, usually nonspherical, by cell membrane is crucial in many biological processes. In this study, using Onsager variational principle, we obtain a general wrapping equation…
We perform an analytical investigation of the cell interface dynamics in the framework of a minimal phase field model of cell motility suggested in [1], which consists of two coupled evolution equations for the order parameter and a…
Photophoretic forces, several orders of magnitude stronger than radiation pressure, enable particle trapping at remarkably low optical intensities and have opened pathways to applications in aerosol science, free-space 3D volumetric…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the behavior of closely-fitting spherical and ellipsoidal particles moving through a fluid-filled cylinder at nanometer scales. The particle, the cylinder wall and the fluid solvent are all…
The organization of live cells to tissues is associated with the mechanical interaction between cells, which is mediated through their elastic environment. We model cells as spherical active force dipoles surrounded by an infinite elastic…
Active contributions to fluctuations are a direct consequence of metabolic energy consumption in living cells. Such metabolic processes continuously create active forces, which deform the membrane to control motility, proliferation as well…
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…