Related papers: Heterogeneous biological membranes regulate protei…
A recent burst of dynamic single-cell growth-division data makes it possible to characterize the stochastic dynamics of cell division control in bacteria. Different modeling frameworks were used to infer specific mechanisms from such data,…
In cell membranes, proteins and lipids are organized into sub-micrometric nanodomains of varying size, shape and composition, performing specific functions. Despite their biological importance, the detailed morphology of these nanodomains…
Diffusion in cell membranes is not just simple two-dimensional Brownian motion, but typically depends on the timescale of the observation. The physical origins of this anomalous sub-diffusion are unresolved, and model systems capable of…
Proteins are complex biomolecules that perform a variety of crucial functions within living organisms. Designing and generating novel proteins can pave the way for many future synthetic biology applications, including drug discovery.…
Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) composed of as few as three lipid species can phase separate into small-scale lipid domains with stripes and dots patterns. These patterns have been experimentally characterized in terms of how their size…
Many essential cellular processes, including cell division and the establishment of cell polarity during embryogenesis, are regulated by pattern-forming proteins. These proteins often need to bind to a substrate, such as the cell membrane,…
Ever since the raft model for biomembranes has been proposed, the traditional view of biomembranes based on the fluid-mosaic model has been altered. In the raft model, dynamical heterogeneities in multi-component lipid bilayers play an…
Eukaryotic cells maintain their inner order by a hectic process of distillation of molecular factors taking place on the surface of their lipid membranes. To understand the properties of this molecular sorting process, a physical model of…
Proteins in photosynthetic membranes can organize into patterned arrays that span the membrane's lateral size. Attractions between proteins in different layers of a membrane stack can play a key role in this ordering, as was suggested by…
Central to understanding membrane bound cell signaling is to quantify how the membrane ultra-structure consisting of transient spatial domains modulates signaling and how the signaling influences this ultra-structure. Yet, measuring the…
Intracellular transport processes are essential to the healthy development of many organisms as well as more generally to healthy cellular function. The complex dynamics and interactions between protein molecules and filaments on different…
Multicomponent lipid mixtures exhibit complex phase behavior, including coexistence of nanoscopic fluid phases in ternary mixtures mimicking the composition of the outer leaflet of mammalian plasma membrane. The physical mechanisms…
Biomembranes wrapping cells and organelles are not only the partitions that separate the insides but also dynamic fields for biological functions accompanied by membrane shape changes. In this review, we discuss the spatiotemporal patterns…
Populations of heterogeneous cells play an important role in many biological systems. In this paper we consider systems where each cell can be modelled by an ordinary differential equation. To account for heterogeneity, parameter values are…
The biological properties of proteins are uniquely determined by their structure and dynamics. A protein in solution populates a structural ensemble of metastable configurations around the global fold. From overall rotation to local…
We investigate theoretically the behavior of proteins as well as other large macromolecules which are incorporated into amphiphilic monolayers at the air-water interface. We assume the monolayer to be in the coexistence region of the…
Most biochemical reactions in living cells rely on diffusive search for target molecules or regions in a heterogeneous overcrowded cytoplasmic medium. Rapid re-arrangements of the medium constantly change the effective diffusivity felt…
We propose a mechanism for mechanical regulation at the membrane of living cells, based on the exchange of membrane area between the cell membrane and a membrane reservoir. The reservoir is composed of invaginated membrane microdomains…
Many ternary mixtures composed of saturated and unsaturated lipids with cholesterol (Chol) exhibit a region of coexistence between liquid-disordered $(L_d)$ and liquid-ordered $(L_o)$ domains, bearing some similarities to lipid rafts in…
The interactions between diffusing molecules and membrane-bound receptors drive numerous cellular processes. In this work, we develop a spatial model of molecular interactions with membrane receptors by homogenizing the cell membrane and…