Related papers: The interplay between phase-separation and gene-en…
Central to understanding membrane bound cell signaling is to quantify how the membrane ultra-structure consisting of transient spatial domains modulates signaling and how the signaling influences this ultra-structure. Yet, measuring 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…
The mechanical model based on beads and springs, which we recently proposed to study non-specific DNA-protein interactions [J. Chem. Phys. 130, 015103 (2009)], was improved by describing proteins as sets of interconnected beads instead of…
In the framework of a two-band model, we study the phase separation regime of different kinds of strongly correlated charge carriers as a function of the energy splitting between the two sets of bands. The narrow (wide) band simulates the…
Cells operate in part by compartmentalizing chemical reactions. For example, recent work has shown that chromatin, the material that contains the cell's genome, can auto-regulate its structure by utilizing reaction products (proteins, RNA)…
New insights into phase separation in colloidal suspensions are provided via a new dynamical theory based on the Polydisperse Lattice-Gas model. The model gives a simplified description of polydisperse colloids, incorporating a hard-core…
Adhesion between membranes is studied using a phenomenological model, where the inter-membrane distance is coupled to the concentration of sticker molecules on the membranes. The model applies to both for adhesion of two flexible membranes…
Protein-DNA interactions are vital for many processes in living cells, especially transcriptional regulation and DNA modification. To further our understanding of these important processes on the microscopic level, it is necessary that…
Recent theoretical studies found that mixtures of active and passive colloidal particles phase separate but only at very high activity ratio. The high value poses serious obstacles for experimental exploration of this phenomenon. Here we…
Bacterial chromosome replication occurs in the absence of a canonical spindle apparatus; yet it reliably produces organised and segregated genomes. While both passive and active mechanisms have been investigated, DNA replication itself is a…
We study the interplay between surface roughening and phase separation during the growth of binary films. Renormalization group calculations are performed on a pair of equations coupling the interface height and order parameter…
Phase separation of various materials has been studied for one and a half centuries. In the last two decades, phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids has received enormous attention, due its relevance to cellular functions. However,…
We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying…
The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…
A general model for the early recognition and colocalization of homologous DNA sequences is proposed. We show, on a thermodynamic ground, how the distance between two homologous DNA sequences is spontaneously regulated by the concentration…
Phase separation in polymer solutions often correlates with single-chain and two-chain properties, such as the single-chain radius of gyration, Rg, and the pairwise second virial coefficient, B22. However, recent studies have shown that…
We study analytically the intricate phase behavior of cross-linked $AB$ diblock copolymer melts, which can undergo two main phase transitions due to quenched random constraints: Gelation, i.e., spatially random localization of polymers…
RNA protein interactions control the fate of cellular RNAs and play an important role in gene regulation. An interdependency between such interactions allows for the implementation of logic functions in gene regulation. We investigate the…
Liquid-liquid phase separation of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) is a major undergirding factor in the regulated formation of membraneless organelles in the cell. The phase behavior of an IDP is sensitive to its amino acid…
We have studied the extended Hubbard model with pair hopping in the atomic limit for arbitrary electron density and chemical potential. The Hamiltonian considered consists of (i) the effective on-site interaction U and (ii) the intersite…