Related papers: Flexoelectricity and the Entropic Force between Fl…
Biological membranes are capacitors that can be charged by applying a field across the membrane. The charges on the capacitor exert a force on the membrane that leads to electrostriction, i.e. a thinning of the membrane. Since the force is…
The complex interplay between the various attractive and repulsive forces that mediate between biological membranes governs an astounding array of biological functions: cell adhesion, membrane fusion, self-assembly, binding-unbinding…
Active contributions to fluctuations are a direct consequence of metabolic energy consumption in living cells. Such metabolic processes continuously create active forces, which deform the membrane to control motility, proliferation as well…
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
Particles embedded in a fluctuating interface experience forces and torques mediated by the deformations and by the thermal fluctuations of the medium. Considering a system of two cylinders bound to a fluid membrane we show that the…
We study the effects of long-range electrostatic interactions on the thermal fluctuations of free-standing crystalline membranes exhibiting spontaneous electric polarization directed at each point along the local normal to the surface. We…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
The morphology of spherically confined flexoelectric fluid membrane vesicles in an external uniform electric field is studied numerically. Due to the deformations induced by the confinement, the membrane becomes polarized resulting in an…
Biomembranes are thin capacitors with the unique feature of displaying phase transitions in a physiologically relevant regime. We investigate the voltage and lateral pressure dependence of their capacitance close to their chain melting…
Thermal fluctuations strongly modify the large length-scale elastic behavior of crosslinked membranes, giving rise to scale-dependent elastic moduli. While thermal effects in flat membranes are well understood, many natural and artificial…
Adhesion bonds between membranes and surfaces are attracted to each other via effective interactions whose origin the entropy loss due to the reduction in the amplitude of the membrane thermal fluctuations in the vicinity of the adhesion…
We analyze the non-equilibrium shape fluctuations of giant unilamellar vesicles encapsulating motile bacteria. Owing to bacteria--membrane collisions, we experimentally observe a significant increase in the magnitude of membrane…
Biological membranes and vesicles play a central role in living systems, forming dynamic interfaces that regulate cellular organization and function. Classical descriptions of membrane mechanics that are rooted in equilibrium statistical…
We generalize the predictions for attractions between over-all neutral surfaces induced by charge fluctuations/correlations to non-uniform systems that include dielectric discontinuities, as is the case for mixed charged lipid membranes in…
The aim of this work is to revisit the phenomenological theory of the interaction between membrane inclusions, mediated by the membrane fluctuations. We consider the case where the inclusions are separated by distances larger than their…
In biological settings membranes typically interact locally with other membranes or the extracellular matrix in the exterior, as well as with internal cellular structures such as the cytoskeleton. Characterization of the dynamic properties…
We consider a one-dimensional elastic membrane, which is pushed by growing filaments. The filaments tend to grow by creating local protrusions in the membrane and this process has surface energy and bending energy costs. Although it is…
We study the effects of thermal fluctuations on symmetric tensionless heterogeneous (two-component) fluid membranes in a simple minimal model. Close to the critical point $T_c$ of the associated miscibility phase transition of the…
We consider the interaction between two rods embedded in a fluctuating surface. The modification of fluctuations by the rods leads to an attractive long-range interaction between them. We consider fluctuations governed by either surface…