Related papers: Critical Phenomena in Plasma Membrane Organization…
Cellular membranes are a heterogeneous mix of lipids, proteins and small molecules. Special groupings of saturated lipids and cholesterol form a liquid-ordered phase, known as `lipid rafts,' serving as platforms for signaling, trafficking…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has recently emerged as an important topic in the context of cellular organization. Within this context, there are multiple poorly understood features; for instance hints of critical behavior in the plasma…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
Lipid phase heterogeneity in the plasma membrane is thought to be crucial for many aspects of cell signaling, but the physical basis of participating membrane domains such as "lipid rafts" remains controversial. Here we consider a lattice…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has emerged as a fundamental mechanism underlying intracellular organization, with evidence for it being reported in numerous different systems. However, there is a growing concern regarding the lack of…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Heterogeneities in the cell membrane due to coexisting lipid phases have been conjectured to play a major functional role in cell signaling and membrane trafficking. Thereby the material properties of multiphase systems, such as the line…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
The organization of lipids in biological membranes is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is how to control lateral lipid composition in supported membranes which are…
Ever since the raft model for biomembranes has been proposed, the traditional view of biomembranes based on the fluid-mosaic model has been altered. In the raft model, dynamical heterogeneities in multi-component lipid bilayers play an…
All cells must keep time to consistently perform vital biological functions. To that end, the coupling and interrelatedness of diverse subsecond events in the complex cellular environment, such as protein folding or translation rates,…
To explain the appearance of heterogeneities in the plasma membrane, I propose a hypothesis which begins with the observation that fluctuations in the membrane curvature are coupled to the difference between compositions in one leaf and the…
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…
We present a minimal model of plasma membrane heterogeneity that combines criticality with connectivity to cortical cytoskeleton. Our model is motivated by recent observations of micron-sized critical fluctuations in plasma membrane…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
We propose a minimal model for miscibility phase transitions (MPTs) in a class of asymmetric two-component heterogeneous fluid membranes at equilibrium that generically display both first and second order MPTs, controlled by the interplay…
Cell differentiation is an important process in living organisms. Differentiation is mostly based on binary decisions with the progenitor cells choosing between two specific lineages. The differentiation dynamics have both deterministic and…
We present a general and systematic theory of non-equilibrium dynamics of multi-component fluid membranes, in general, and membranes containing transmembrane proteins, in particular. Developed based on a minimal number of principles of…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…