Related papers: Vesiculation mechanisms mediated by anisotropic pr…
The dynamics of a nucleate cell in shear flow is of great relevance in cancer cells and circulatory tumor cells where they dominate the dynamics of blood. Buoyed by the success of Giant Unilamellar vesicles in explaining the dynamics of…
The depletion interaction mediated by non-adsorbing polymers promotes condensation and assembly of repulsive colloidal particles into diverse higher-order structures and materials. One example, with particularly rich emergent behaviors, is…
The motor-driven intracellular transport of vesicles to synaptic targets in the axons and dendrites of neurons plays a crucial role in normal cell function. Moreover, stimulus-dependent regulation of active transport is an important…
Living cells employ excitable reaction-diffusion waves for internal cellular functions, in which curvature-inducing proteins are often involved. However, the role of their mechanochemical coupling is not well understood. Here, we report the…
The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is the largest continuous membrane-bound organelle in the cell and plays a central role in the synthesis and turnover of many lipids and proteins. It connects directly to the nucleus through specialized…
The spatio-temporal organization of proteins and the associated morphological changes in membranes are of importance in cell signaling. Several mechanisms that promote the aggregation of proteins at low cell surface concentrations have been…
We explore the interplay of membrane curvature and nonspecific binding due to excluded-volume effects among colloidal particles inside lipid bilayer vesicles. We trapped submicron spheres of two different sizes inside a pear-shaped,…
Active diffusion of intracellular components is emerging as an important process in cell biology. This process is mediated by complex assemblies of molecular motors and cytoskeletal filaments that drive force generation in the cytoplasm and…
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…
Integral membrane proteins deform the surrounding bilayer creating long-ranged forces that influence distant proteins. These forces can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the proteins' shape, height, contact angle with the bilayer, as…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
In biology, cells undergo deformations under the action of flow caused by the fluid surrounding them. These flows lead to shape changes and instabilities that have been explored in detail for single component vesicles. However, cell…
Shape transformations of flat bilayer membranes and vesicles induced by hydrolysis and condensation reactions of amphiphilic molecules are studied using coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. The hydrolysis and condensation…
While the behavior of vesicles in thermodynamic equilibrium has been studied extensively, how active forces control vesicle shape transformations is not understood. Here, we combine theory and simulations to study the shape behavior of…
Constancy of life vitally depends on the internalization of particles through biomembranes. Of particular interest, cellular uptake, including phagocytosis, receptor-mediated endocytosis, and membrane fusion, critically depends on the…
Various proteins adsorb spontaneously on the sidewalls of acid-oxidized single-walled carbon nanotubes. This simple non-specific binding scheme can be used to afford non-covalent protein-nanotube conjugates. The proteins are found to be…
Using the Helmholtz decomposition of the vector field of folding fluxes in a two-dimensional space of collective variables, a potential of the driving force for protein folding is introduced. The potential has two components. One component…
Molecular-motor generated active stresses drive the cytoskeleton away from equilibrium, endowing it with tunable mechanical properties that are essential for diverse functions such as cell division and motility[1-5]. Designing analogous…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
The viscosity of lipid bilayer membranes plays an important role in determining the diffusion constant of embedded proteins and the dynamics of membrane deformations, yet it has historically proven very difficult to measure. Here we…