Related papers: Critical Phenomena in Plasma Membrane Organization…
The spatial organization of cell membrane glycoproteins and glycolipids is critical for mediating the binding of ligands, receptors, and macromolecules on the plasma membrane. However, we currently do not have the methods to quantify the…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
Most biological molecules contain acido-basic groups that modulate their structure and interactions. A consequence is that pH gradients, local heterogeneities and dynamic variations are used by cells and organisms to drive or regulate…
Diffusion-mediated surface phenomena are crucial for human life and industry, with examples ranging from oxygen capture by lung alveolar surface to heterogeneous catalysis, gene regulation, membrane permeation and filtration processes.…
The thermodynamic (TD) properties of biological membranes play a central role for living systems. It has been suggested, for instance, that nonlinear pulses such as action potentials (APs) can only exist if the membrane state is in vicinity…
This review reports some key results in theoretical investigations on configurations of lipid membranes and presents several challenges in this field which involve (i) exact solutions to the shape equation of lipid vesicles; (ii) exact…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
Synchronization of activity among myocytes constituting vital organs, e.g., the heart, is crucial for physiological functions. Self-organized coordination in such heterogeneous ensemble of excitable and oscillatory cells is therefore of…
Phase separation is the thermodynamic process that explains how droplets form in multicomponent fluids. These droplets can provide controlled compartments to localize chemical reactions, and reactions can also affect the droplets' dynamics.…
Cell-to-cell heterogeneity drives a range of (patho)physiologically important phenomena, such as cell fate and chemotherapeutic resistance. The role of metabolism, and particularly mitochondria, is increasingly being recognised as an…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
In complex systems, external parameters often determine the phase in which the system operates, i.e., its macroscopic behavior. For nearly a century, statistical physics has extensively studied systems' transitions across phases,…
Model biomembrane systems play a crucial role in advancing biomedical research by providing simplified yet effective platforms for exploring complex biological mechanisms. These systems span a wide range of scales, from…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. By adopting a simple theoretical framework for intra-cellular chemical reaction dynamics with…
In these lectures I discuss long-scale properties of fluctuating polymerized membranes in the presence of network anisotropy and random heterogeneities. Amazingly, even infinitesimal amount of these seemingly innocuous but physically…
We propose a model describing liquid-solid phase coexistence in mixed lipid membranes by including explicitly the occurrence of a rippled phase. For a single component membrane, we employ a previous model in which the membrane thickness is…
Many protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks take place in the fluid yet structured plasma membrane. Lipid domains, sometimes termed rafts, have been implicated in the functioning of various membrane-bound signaling processes. Here, we…
The properties of hydrogen at high pressure have wide implications in astrophysics and high-pressure physics. Its phase change in the liquid is variously described as a metallization, H2-dissociation, density discontinuity or plasma phase…
The cell nucleus is increasingly recognized as a mechanosensitive organelle whose mesoscale mechanical heterogeneity (100 nm 10 um) is inseparable from genome regulation yet remains weakly integrated into systems biology and omics…
We use a lattice model of a ternary mixture containing saturated and unsaturated lipids with cholesterol (Chol), to study the structural properties characterizing the coexistence between the liquid-disordered and liquid-ordered phases.…