Related papers: Avidity and surface mobility in multivalent ligand…
Cellular uptake through the lipid membranes plays an important role in adsorbing nutrients and fighting infection and can be used for drug delivery and nanomedicine developments. Endocytosis is one of the known pathways of the cellular…
Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and…
Receptor-mediated endocytosis requires that the energy of adhesion overcomes the deformation energy of the plasma membrane. The resulting driving force is balanced by dissipative forces, leading to deterministic dynamical equations. While…
The phenomenon of molecular binding, where two molecules, referred to as a receptor and a ligand, bind together to form a ligand-receptor complex, is ubiquitous in biology and essential for the accurate functioning of all life-sustaining…
The dynamics of a membrane coupled to an active fluid on top of a substrate is considered theoretically. It is assumed that the director field of the active fluid has rotational symmetry in the membrane plane. This situation is likely to be…
We consider membranes adhered through specific receptor-ligand bonds. Thermal undulations of the membrane induce effective interactions between adhesion sites. We derive an upper bound to the free energy that is independent of interaction…
Bistability is a major mechanism for cellular decision making and usually results from positive feedback in biochemical control systems. Here we show theoretically that bistability between unbound and bound states of adhesion clusters…
The most important function of proteins may well be to bind to other biomolecules. It has long been felt that kinetic rates of bond formation and dissociation between soluble receptors and ligands might account for most features of the…
We analyze the structural behavior of a single polymer chain grafted to an attractive, flexible surface. Our model is composed of a coarse-grained bead-and-spring polymer and a tethered membrane. By means of extensive parallel tempering…
In thermal equilibrium, a colloidal particle between two parallel plates immersed in a fluid which partially wets both the particle and the plates, is attracted by the walls. However, if the particle moves parallel to the plates, a…
Multivalent particles, i.e. microscopic constructs having multiple ligands, can be used to target surfaces selectively depending on their receptor density. Typically, there is a sharp onset of multivalent binding as the receptor density…
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
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…
It is proposed that lubricant molecules adsorbed on an interface between two asperities in contact, which is rough on the atomic scale, can switch the interface from the strong to weak pinning regime, resulting in a large reduction in the…
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 translocation of a polymer through a pore in a membrane separating fluids of different viscosities is studied via several computational approaches. Starting with the polymer halfway, we find that as a viscosity difference across the…
Peripheral membrane proteins can reversibly and specifically bind to biological membranes to carry out functions such as cell signalling, enzymatic activity, or membrane remodelling. Structures of these proteins and of their lipid-binding…
Constancy of life vitally depends on the internalization of particles through biomembranes. Of particular interest, cellular uptake, including phagocytosis, receptor-mediated endocytosis, and membrane fusion, critically depends on the…
The interactions between diffusing molecules and membrane-bound receptors drive numerous cellular processes. In this work, we develop a spatial model of molecular interactions with membrane receptors by homogenizing the cell membrane and…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…