Related papers: Critical Phenomena in Plasma Membrane Organization…
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. Yet the…
Cell differentiation in multicellular organisms is a complex process whose mechanism can be understood by a reductionist approach, in which the individual processes that control the generation of different cell types are identified.…
We consider how membrane fluctuations can modify the miscibility of lipid mixtures, that is to say how the phase diagram of a boundary-constrained membrane is modified when the membrane is allowed to fluctuate freely in the case of zero…
Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…
From the perspective of physical properties, the cell membrane is an exotic two-dimensional material that has a dual nature: it exhibits characteristics of fluids, i.e., lipid molecules show lateral diffusion, while also demonstrating…
The dynamical response of a lipid membrane to a local perturbation of its molecular symmetry is investigated theoretically. A density asymmetry between the two membrane leaflets is predominantly released by in-plane lipid diffusion or…
The dynamical properties and mechanical functions of amorphous materials are governed by their microscopic structures, particularly the elasticity of the interaction networks, which is generally complicated by structural heterogeneity. This…
Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT), and the corresponding reverse process, Mesenchymal-Epithelial Transition (MET), are dynamic and reversible cellular programs orchestrated by many changes at biochemical and morphological levels. A…
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…
Active matter is not only indispensable to our understanding of diverse biological processes, but also provides a fertile ground for discovering novel physics. Many emergent properties impossible for equilibrium systems have been…
In hydrodynamic descriptions of lipid bilayers, the membrane is often approximated as being impermeable to the surrounding, solute-containing fluid. However, biological and in vitro lipid membranes are influenced by their permeability and…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…
Although coarse-grained models have been widely used to explain exotic phenomena in complex fluids, such as droplet formation in living cells, these conventional approaches often fail to capture the intricate microscopic degrees of freedom…
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…
A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…
Gas transport across cell membrane is a very important process in biochemistry which is essential for many crucial tasks, including cell respiration pH regulation in the cell. In the late 1990's, the suggestion that gasses are transported…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…
We theoretically investigate the thermally-driven curvature and lipid density fluctuations of a quasi-spherical vesicle, accounting for the dissipation due to monolayer viscosity and intermonolayer friction. The theory predicts that…
Increasing the number of particles in a system often leads to qualitative changes in its properties, such as breaking of symmetries and the appearance of phase transitions. This renders a macroscopic system fundamentally different from its…
By generalizing a class of models recently introduced to account for protracted transients in biological systems, we identify a novel mechanism for hyperuniformity. In this model, competition of particles over a shared resource guides the…