Related papers: Controlling composition of coexisting phases via m…
In a companion paper, we put forth a thermodynamic model for complex formation via a chemical reaction involving multiple macromolecular species, which may subsequently undergo liquid-liquid phase separation and a further transition into a…
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…
Phase transitions, such as the freezing of water and the magnetisation of a ferromagnet upon lowering the ambient temperature, are familiar physical phenomena. Interestingly, such a collective change of behaviour at a phase transition is…
Biomolecular condensates are essential for cellular organization and result from phase separation in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Among various models, chemically active droplets play a significant role, consisting of…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
If a given behavior of a multi-agent system restricts the phase variable to a invariant manifold, then we define a phase transition as change of physical characteristics such as speed, coordination, and structure. We define such a phase…
Differences in activities in colloidal particles are sufficient to drive phase separation between active and passive (or less active) particles, even if they have only excluded volume interactions. In this paper, we study the phase…
Mixtures of several macromolecular species can lead to the formation of higher-order structures that often display non-ideal mixing behavior. In this work, we propose a minimal model of a quaternary system which considers the formation of a…
Unlike fluids at thermal equilibrium, biomolecular mixtures in living systems can sustain nonequilibrium steady states, in which active processes modify the conformational states of the constituent molecules. Despite qualitative…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
Phase separation of two phase separating solutes in a common solvent can result in mesoscale (micron-sized) droplets with complex topologies of the domains of each solute within each droplet. Such topologies have been observed in-vitro in…
Phase-separated liquid condensates can spatially organize and thereby regulate chemical processes. However, the physicochemical mechanisms underlying such regulation remain elusive as the intramolecular interactions responsible for phase…
Liquids with quasi - chemical bonding between molecules are described in terms of vertex model. It is shown that this bonding results in liquid - liquid phase transition, which occurs between phases with different mean density of…
Demixing of binary liquids is a ubiquitous transition, which is explained using a well-established thermodynamic formalism that requires equality of intensive thermodynamics parameters across the phase boundaries. Demixing transitions also…
During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
We study a mechanism for reliable switching in biomolecular signal-transduction cascades. Steady bistable states are created by system-size cooperative effects in populations of proteins, in spite of the fact that the phosphorylation-state…
Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…
These lecture notes describe a basic theory of chemically active droplets, which are droplets kept away from equilibrium by driven chemical reactions. The notes assume a basic familiarity with equilibrium thermodynamics of phase separation,…