Related papers: Heterogeneous biological membranes regulate protei…
Protein dynamics is a fundamental element to comprehend their biological functions. However, a theoretical picture providing microscopic-detail explanation of its relevant features is still missing. One of the outmost relevant properties…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
One of the many ways cells transmit information within their volume is through steady spatial gradients of different proteins. However, the mechanism through which proteins without any sources or sinks form such single-cell gradients is not…
Membrane bending is an extensively studied problem from both modeling and experimental perspectives because of the wide implications of curvature generation in cell biology. Many of the curvature generating aspects in membranes can be…
The spatial organization of complex biochemical reactions is essential for the regulation of cellular processes. Membrane-less structures called foci containing high concentrations of specific proteins have been reported in a variety of…
The movement of molecules inside living cells is a fundamental feature of biological processes. The ability to both observe and analyse the details of molecular diffusion in vivo at the single molecule and single cell level can add…
Determining the middle of the bacteria cell and the proper placement of the septum is essential to the division of the bacterial cell. In E. coli, this process depends on the proteins MinC, MinD, and MinE. Here, the Lattice Boltzmann method…
In living cells, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), such as FUS and DDX4, undergo phase separation, forming biomolecular condensates. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate their behavior in their respective homogenous…
By performing molecular dynamics simulations with up to 132 million coarse-grained particles in half-micron sized boxes, we show that hydrodynamics quantitatively explains the finite-size effects on diffusion of lipids, proteins, and carbon…
There are many processes in cell biology that can be modeled in terms of particles diffusing in a two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) bounded domain $\Omega \subset \R^d$ containing a set of small subdomains or interior…
We discuss a realistic scenario, accounting for the existence of sub-micrometric protein domains in cell membranes. At the biological level, such membrane domains have been shown to be specialized, in order to perform a determined…
To explain the appearance of heterogeneities in the plasma membrane, I propose a hypothesis which begins with the observation that fluctuations in the membrane curvature are coupled to the difference between compositions in one leaf and the…
We consider the lateral diffusion of a protein interacting with the curvature of the membrane. The interaction energy is minimized if the particle is at a membrane position with a certain curvature that agrees with the spontaneous curvature…
Cell membranes interact with a myriad of curvature-active proteins that control membrane morphology and are responsible for mechanosensation and mechanotransduction. Some of these proteins, such as those containing BAR domains, are curved…
We present a position Langevin equation for overdamped particle motion on rough two-dimensional surfaces. A Brownian Dynamics algorithm is suggested to evolve this equation numerically, allowing for the prediction of effective (projected)…
Lipid phase heterogeneity in the plasma membrane is thought to be crucial for many aspects of cell signaling, but the physical basis of participating membrane domains such as "lipid rafts" remains controversial. Here we consider a lattice…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is the mechanism underlying the formation of biomolecular condensates. Disordered protein regions often drive phase separation, but molecular interactions of disordered protein regions are not well understood,…
In this paper, we propose a Generalized Langevin Equation (GLE)-based model to describe the lateral diffusion of a protein in a lipid bilayer. The memory kernel is represented in terms of a viscous (instantaneous) and an elastic (non…
The fundamental processes of biological development are governed by multiple signaling molecules that create non-uniform concentration profiles known as morphogen gradients. It is widely believed that the establishment of morphogen…
We study protein diffusion in multicomponent lipid membranes close to a rigid substrate separated by a layer of viscous fluid. The large-distance, long-time asymptotics for Brownian motion are calculated using a nonlinear stochastic…