Related papers: Two timescales control the creation of large prote…

Protein aggregation in the form of amyloid fibrils has important biological and technological implications. Although the self-assembly process is highly efficient, aggregates not in the fibrillar form would also occur and it is important to…

Inspired by motile cells in tissue formation, we find that active systems of self-aligning adhesive particles undergo ballistic aggregation through a flocking transition. This kinetic regime emerges when the cluster persistence length grows…

A physical scenario accounting for the existence of size-limited submicrometric domains in cell membranes is proposed. It is based on the numerical investigation of the counterpart, in lipidic membranes where proteins are diffusing, of the…

The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogenous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell center. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the…

Heterogeneous systems of active matter exhibit a range of complex emergent dynamical patterns. In particular, it is difficult to predict the properties of the mixed system based on its constituents. These considerations are particularly…

We introduce a stochastic model describing aggregation of misfolded proteins and degradation by the protein quality control system in a single cell. In analogy with existing literature, aggregates can grow, nucleate and fragment…

Liquid cellular compartments spatially segregate from the cytoplasm and can regulate aberrant protein aggregation, a process linked to several medical conditions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Yet the mechanisms by which…

We use mesoscale simulations to gain insight into the digestion of biopolymers by studying the break-up dynamics of polymer aggregates (boluses) bound by physical cross-links. We investigate aggregate evolution, establishing that the…

Protein folding, peptide aggregation and crystallization, as well as adsorption of molecules on soft or solid substrates have an essential feature in common: In all these processes, structure formation is guided by a collective, cooperative…

Non-equilibrium cluster-cluster aggregation of particles diffusing in or at the cell membrane has been hypothesized to lead to domains of finite size in different biological contexts such as lipid rafts, cell adhesion complexes, or…

We generalize the ordinary aggregation process to allow for choice. In ordinary aggregation, two random clusters merge and form a larger aggregate. In our implementation of choice, a target cluster and two candidate clusters are randomly…

Aggregates of misfolded proteins are a hallmark of many age-related diseases. Recently, they have been linked to aging of Escherichia coli (E. coli) where protein aggregates accumulate at the old pole region of the aging bacterium. Because…

Circulating tumor cell clusters play an important role in the metastatic cascade. These clusters can acquire a migratory and more invasive phenotype, and coordinate their motion to migrate as a collective. Before such clusters can form by…

Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…

The cytoskeleton protein actin assembles into large bundles when supporting stresses in the cell, but grows into a fine branched network to induce cell motion. Such self-organization processes are studied in artificial networks of…

The cytoplasm of a living cell is crowded with several macromolecules of different shapes and sizes. Molecular diffusion in such a medium becomes anomalous due to the presence of macromolecules and diffusivity is expected to decrease with…

The formation of condensates is now considered as a major organization principle of eukaryotic cells. Several studies have recently shown that the properties of these condensates are affected by enzymatic reactions. We propose here a simple…

A recently introduced thermodynamic model of amphiphilic molecules in solution has yielded, under certain realistic conditions, a significant presence of metastable aggregates well below the critical micelle concentration -- a phenomenon…

Investigation of protein self-assembly processes is important for the understanding of the growth processes of functional proteins as well as disease-causing amyloids. Inside cells, intrinsic molecular fluctuations are so high that they…

Self-assembly of proteins is a biological phenomenon which gives rise to spontaneous formation of amyloid fibrils or polymers. The starting point of this phase, called nucleation exhibits an important variability among replicated…