Related papers: A model of membrane deformations driven by a surfa…
Membrane deformation inside living cells is crucial for the proper shaping of various intracellular organelles and is necessary during the fission/fusion processes that allow membrane recycling and transport (e.g. endocytosis). Proteins…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
We develop a self-consistent free-energy framework in which membrane shape and osmotic pressure are determined simultaneously in a finite reservoir by minimizing bending elasticity and solute entropy. Solute conservation makes osmotic…
The transport of particles across lipid-bilayer membranes is important for biological cells to exchange information and material with their environment. Large particles often get wrapped by membranes, a process which has been intensively…
Membrane proteins typically deform the surrounding lipid bilayer membrane, which can play an important role in the function, regulation, and organization of membrane proteins. Membrane elasticity theory provides a beautiful description of…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Eukaryote cells have a flexible shape, which dynamically changes according to the function performed by the cell. One mechanism for deforming the cell membrane into the desired shape is through the expression of curved membrane proteins.…
An integrated mechanical model for fiber-laden membranes is presented and representative predictions of relevance to cellulose ordering and orientation in the plant cell wall are presented. The model describes nematic liquid crystalline…
Many cell functions require a concerted effort from multiple membrane proteins, for example, for signaling, cell division, and endocytosis. One contribution to their successful self-organization stems from the membrane deformations that…
The Helfrich energy is commonly used to model the elastic bending energy of lipid bilayers in membrane mechanics. The governing differential equations for certain geometric characteristics of the shape of the membrane can be obtained by…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
Lipid bilayer membranes are flexible thin laterally fluid films consisting of two unimolecular layers of lipids. On spatial scales much larger than the bilayer thickness, the membrane elasticity is well determined by its shape and…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
Rafts, or functional domains, are transient nano- or mesoscopic structures in the plasma membrane and are thought to be essential for many cellular processes such as signal transduction, adhesion, trafficking and lipid/protein sorting.…
We investigate the properties of membranes under tension by Monte-Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid bilayers. We give a comprising overview of the behavior of several membrane characteristics, such as the area…
Lipid vesicles are known to undergo complex conformational transitions, but it remains challenging to systematically characterize non-equilibrium membrane shape dynamics. Here, we report the direct observation of lipid vesicle relaxation…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
The dynamics of a spherical elastic capsule, containing a Newtonian fluid bounded by an elastic membrane and immersed in another Newtonian fluid, in a uniform DC electric field is investigated. Discontinuity of electrical properties such as…
The microscopic structure of a plant cell wall is given by cellulose microfibrils embedded in a cell wall matrix. In this paper we consider a microscopic model for interactions between viscoelastic deformations of a plant cell wall and…