Related papers: Patterning of multicomponent elastic shells by Gau…
Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a helical bundle. When the bacterium changes its…
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
We study a model of a lipid bilayer membrane described by two order parameters: the chemical composition described using the Gaussian model and the spatial configuration described with the elastic deformation model of a membrane with a…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
We investigate a set of design principles that link specific features of interparticle interactions to predictable structural and dynamic outcomes in two-dimensional self-assembly, a framework relevant to soft matter and biological…
Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Collective behavior of proteins on biomembranes is usually studied within the spontaneous curvature model. Here we consider an alternative phenomenological approach, which accounts consistently for partial ordering of proteins as well as…
Inverse bicontinuous cubic phases are ubiquitous in lipid-water mixtures and consist of a lipid bilayer forming a cubic minimal surface, thereby dividing space into two cubic networks of water channels. For small hydrocarbon chain lengths,…
We discuss a class of models for particulate gels in which the particle contacts are described by an effective interaction combining a two-body attraction and a three-body angular repulsion. Using molecular dynamics, we show how varying the…
In the presence of a non-adsorbing polymer, monodisperse rod-like particles assemble into colloidal membranes, which are one rod-length thick liquid-like monolayers of aligned rods. Unlike 3D edgeless bilayer vesicles, colloidal monolayer…
The predominant structural protein in vertebrates is collagen, which plays a key role in extracellular matrix and connective tissue mechanics. Despite its prevalence and physical importance in biology, the mechanical properties of molecular…
Many bacteria use rotating helical flagellar filaments to swim. The filaments undergo polymorphic transformations in which the helical pitch and radius change abruptly. These transformations arise in response to mechanical loading, changes…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
Despite the recognized importance of the multi-scale spatio-temporal organization of proteins, most computational tools can only access a limited spectrum of time and spatial scales, thereby ignoring the effects on protein behavior of the…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
Experiments on quasistatic crack propagation in gelatin hydrogels reveal a new branching instability triggered by wetting the tip opening with a drop of aqueous solvent less viscous than the bulk one. We show that the emergence of unstable…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…