Related papers: Controlling liquid-liquid phase behavior with an a…
Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…
The physical chemistry of liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of polymer solutions bears directly on the assembly of biologically functional droplet-like bodies from proteins and nucleic acids. These biomolecular condensates include…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
Phase separating systems that are maintained away from thermodynamic equilibrium via molecular processes represent a class of active systems, which we call active emulsions. These systems are driven by external energy input for example…
In the realm of nanoscience, the dynamic behaviors of liquids at scales beyond the conventional structural relaxation time, $\tau$, unfold a fascinating blend of solid-like characteristics, including the propagation of collective shear…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Mixtures of glass-forming fluids sometimes exhibit glass-glass phase separation at low temperatures. Here, we use a molecular dynamics simulation to study one of the simplest examples of the glass-glass phase separation. We consider a…
For a deeply supercooled liquid just above its glass transition temperature, we present a simple thermodynamic model, where the deeply supercooled liquid is assumed to be a mixture of solid-like and liquid-like micro regions. The mole…
Liquid-gas phase coexistence in a boundary-driven diffusive system is studied by analyzing fluctuating hydrodynamics of a density field defined on a one-dimensional lattice with a space interval $\Lambda$. When an interface width $\ell$ is…
Glass-to-glass and liquid-to-liquid phase transitions were observed many years ago in bulk and confined water with or without applied pressure. It is shown that they result from the competition of two-liquid phases separated by an enthalpy…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
We study the thermodynamic stability of fluid-fluid phase separation in binary nonadditive mixtures of hard-spheres for moderate size ratios. We are interested in elucidating the role played by small amounts of nonadditivity in determining…
We study phase behaviours of lipid--bilayer vesicles functionalised by ligand--receptor complexes made of synthetic DNA by introducing a modelling framework and a dedicated experimental platform. In particular, we perform Monte Carlo…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
We report a Monte Carlo finite-size scaling study of the demixing transition of a symmetrical Lennard-Jones binary fluid mixture. For equal concentration of species, and for a choice of the unlike-to-like interaction ratio delta=0.7, this…
Phase separation of intrinsically disordered proteins is important for the formation of membraneless organelles, or biomolecular condensates, which play key roles in the regulation of biochemical processes within cells. In this work, we…
Active stresses can cause instabilities in contractile gels and living tissues. Here we describe a generic hydrodynamic theory that treats these systems as a mixture of two phases of varying activity and different mechanical properties. We…
We consider cold polar molecules confined in a helical optical lattice similar to those used in holographic microfabrication. An external electric field polarizes molecules along the axis of the helix. The large-distance inter-molecular…
Biomolecular condensates play essential roles in cellular processes, and recent efforts have focused on understanding their assembly and rational design principles. In this study, we have employed an explicit-solvent minimal statistical…
In equilibrium hard-rod fluids, and in effective hard-rod descriptions of anisotropic soft-particle systems, the transition from the isotropic (I) phase to the nematic phase (N) is observed above the rod aspect ratio L/D = 3.70 as predicted…