Related papers: Membrane morphologies induced by mixtures of arc-s…
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,…
Biological membranes constitute boundaries of cells and cell organelles. Physico-chemical mechanisms at the atomic scale are dictated by protein-lipid interaction strength, lipid composition, lipid distribution in the vicinity of the…
Cell adhesion proteins typically form stable clusters that anchor the cell membrane to its environment. Several works have suggested that cell membrane protein clusters can emerge from a local feedback between the membrane curvature and the…
Polyhedral vesicles with a large bending modulus of the membrane such as the gel phase lipid membrane were studied using a Brownian dynamics simulation. The vesicles exhibit various polyhedral morphologies such as tetrahedron and cube…
Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…
Intracellular organelles are subject to a steady flux of lipids and proteins through active, energy consuming transport processes. Active fission and fusion are promoted by GTPases, e.g., Arf-Coatamer and the Rab-Snare complexes, which both…
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…
BAR superfamily proteins have a banana-shaped domain that causes the local bending of lipid membranes. We study as to how such a local anisotropic curvature induces effective interaction between proteins and changes the global shape of…
Motivated by recent experiments on biomimetic membranes exposed to several aqueous phases, we theoretically study the morphology of a membrane in contact with a liquid droplet formed via aqueous phase separation. We concentrate on membranes…
Membrane tubulation is a ubiquitous process that occurs both at the plasma membrane and on the membranes of intracellular organelles. These tubulation events are known to be mediated by forces applied on the membrane either due to motor…
Intracellular protein patterns regulate a variety of vital cellular processes such as cell division and motility, which often involve dynamic changes of cell shape. These changes in cell shape may in turn affect the dynamics of…
Diffusion rates through a membrane can be asymmetric, if the diffusing particles are spatially extended and the pores in the membrane have asymmetric structure. This phenomenon is demonstrated here via a deterministic simulation of a…
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…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
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…
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…
We consider the lateral diffusion of a protein interacting with the curvature of the membrane. The interaction energy is minimized if the particle is at a membrane position with a certain curvature that agrees with the spontaneous curvature…
We investigate how an externally imposed curvature influences lipid segregation on two-phase-coexistent membranes. We show that the bending-modulus contrast of the two phases and the curvature act together to yield a reduced effective line…
Biomembranes wrapping cells and organelles are not only the partitions that separate the insides but also dynamic fields for biological functions accompanied by membrane shape changes. In this review, we discuss the spatiotemporal patterns…
We show that curvatures in general ambient flow profiles can align shape-asymmetric active particles, revealing a previously overlooked competition with externally applied aligning fields. Focusing on the ubiquitous case of channel flows,…