Related papers: Spiralling molecular structures and chiral selecti…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
Liposomes that achieve a heterogeneous and spatially organized surface through phase separation have been recognized to be a promising platform for delivery purposes. However, their design and optimization through experimentation can be…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
Colloidal membranes, self assembled monolayers of aligned rod like molecules, offer a template for designing membranes with definite shapes and curvature, and possibly new functionalities in the future. Often the constituent rods, due to…
Unravelling the physical mechanisms behind the organisation of lipid domains is a central goal in cell biology and membrane biophysics. Previous studies on cells and model lipid bilayers featuring phase-separated domains found an intricate…
Cellular membranes are a heterogeneous mix of lipids, proteins and small molecules. Special groupings of saturated lipids and cholesterol form a liquid-ordered phase, known as `lipid rafts,' serving as platforms for signaling, trafficking…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
A model of lipid bilayers made of a mixture of two lipids with different average compositions on both leaflets, is developed. A Landau hamiltonian describing the lipid-lipid interactions on each leaflet, with two lipidic fields $\psi_1$ and…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
A coarse-grained molecular model, which consists of a spherical particle and an orientation vector, is proposed to simulate lipid membrane on a large length scale. The solvent is implicitly represented by an effective attractive interaction…
To understand the relationship between the chirality of individual cells and that of tissues and organisms, we have developed a chiral polarized particle model to investigate the movement of cell populations on substrates. Our model…
According to the lipid raft hypothesis, biological lipid membranes are laterally heterogeneous and filled with nanoscale ordered "raft" domains, which are believed to play an important role for the organization of proteins in membranes.…
The structure of the ripple phase of phospholipid membranes remains poorly understood in spite of a large number of theoretical studies, with many experimentally established structural features of this phase unaccounted for. In this article…
In experiments on model membranes, a formation of large domains of different lipid composition is readily observed. However, no such phase separation is observed in the membranes of intact cells. Instead, a structure of small transient…
Lipid rafts are hypothesized to facilitate protein interaction, tension regulation, and trafficking in biological membranes, but the mechanisms responsible for their formation and maintenance are not clear. Insights into many other…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
Morphological transitions of phase separation associated with the asymmetry of lipid composition were investigated using micrometer-sized vesicles of lipid bilayers made from a lipid mixture. The complete macro-phase-separated morphology…
Cells use homeostatic mechanisms to maintain an optimal composition of distinct types of phospholipids in cellular membranes. The hydrophilic dipolar layer at the membrane interface, composed of phospholipid headgroups, regulates 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,…
Domains of condensed-phase monolayers of chiral molecules exhibit a variety of interesting nonequilibrium structures when formed via pressurization. To model these domain patterns, we add a complex field describing the tilt degree of…