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While experiments and computer simulations to study biological phenomena are usually performed in diluted in vitro conditions, such phenomena happen inside the cell, an environment densely packed with diverse macromolecules. Here, we revise…
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…
Experiments show that macromolecular crowding modestly reduces the size of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) even at volume fraction ($\phi$) similar to that in the cytosol whereas DNA undergoes a coil-to-globule transition at very…
Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…
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.…
Knitting is an effective technique for producing complex three-dimensional surfaces owing to the inherent flexibility of interlooped yarns and recent advances in manufacturing providing better control of local stitch patterns. Fully…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Simplified representations of macromolecules help in rationalising and understanding the outcome of atomistic simulations, and serve to the construction of effective, coarse-grained models. The number and distribution of coarse-grained…
The detailed nature of spatially heterogeneous dynamics of glycerol-silica nanocomposites is unraveled by combining dielectric spectroscopy with atomistic simulation and statistical mechanical theory. Analysis of the spatial mobility…
Multicellular systems play a key role in bioprocess and biomedical engineering. Cell ensembles encountered in these setups show phenotypic variability like size and biochemical composition. As this variability may result in undesired…
Protein dynamics in cells may be different from that in dilute solutions in vitro since the environment in cells is highly concentrated with other macromolecules. This volume exclusion due to macromolecular crowding is predicted to affect…
The cell membrane is inherently asymmetric and heterogeneous in its composition, a feature that is crucial for its function. Using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, the physical properties of a 3-component asymmetric mixed lipid…
We utilize a multiscale modeling framework to study the effect of shape, size and ligand composition on the efficacy of binding of a ligand-coated-particle to a substrate functionalized with the target receptors. First, we show how…
We present an information-theoretic approach inspired by distributional clustering to assess the structural heterogeneity of particulate systems. Our method identifies communities of particles that share a similar local structure by…
Targeted drug delivery relies on two physical processes: the selective binding of a therapeutic particle to receptors on a specific cell membrane, followed by transport of the particle across the membrane. In this article, we address some…
Membrane proteins deform the surrounding lipid bilayer, which can lead to membrane-mediated interactions between neighboring proteins. Using the mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) as a model system, we demonstrate how the…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
The dynamic interplay between collective cell movement and the various molecules involved in the accompanying cell signalling mechanisms plays a crucial role in many biological processes including normal tissue development and pathological…
We present the multicomponent functionalized free energies that characterize the low-energy packings of amphiphilic molecules within a membrane through a correspondence to connecting orbits within a reduced dynamical system. To each…
A major part of membrane function is conducted by proteins, both integral and peripheral. Peripheral membrane proteins temporarily adhere to biological membranes, either to the lipid bilayer or to integral membrane proteins with…