Related papers: Spiralling molecular structures and chiral selecti…
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…
Biological membranes are complex, dynamic structures essential for cellular compartmentalization, signaling, and mechanical integrity. The molecular organization of eukaryotic membranes has been extensively studied, including the lipid…
Biological systems exhibit marked molecular asymmetry, with proteins based predominantly on L-amino acids and nucleic acids and carbohydrates largely composed of D-sugars. Explanations for homochirality include asymmetric photochemistry,…
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
Membrane phase-separation is a mechanism that biological membranes often use to locally concentrate specific lipid species in order to organize diverse membrane processes. Phase separation has also been explored as a tool for the design of…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
The rheology of molecular brushes remains challenging to control due to the multiple length scales and relaxation processes involved and the lack of direct observation of molecular conformation during flow. We use molecular dynamics…
We study the effects of chiral constituent molecules on the macroscopic shapes attained by lipid bilayer membranes. Such fluid membranes are beautiful examples of statistical ensembles of random shapes, sometimes coupled to in-plane order.…
Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and…
Lipid bilayer membranes are not uniform and clusters of lipids in a more ordered state exist within the generally disorder lipid milieu of the membrane. These clusters of ordered lipids microdomains are now referred to as lipid rafts.…
We investigate how an externally imposed curvature influences lipid segregation on two-phase-coexistent membranes. We show that the bending-modulus contrast of the two phases and the curvature act together to yield a reduced effective line…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
There are a great many proteins that localize to and collectively generate curvature in biological fluid membranes. We study changes in the topology of fluid membranes due to the presence of highly anisotropic, curvature-inducing proteins.…
We study the shape and texture of finite domains comprising chiral/achiral molecules carrying a tilt field embedded in a 2-dimensional surface. Using a combination of simulations and {\it exact} variational calculations, we determine the…
Living systems are chiral on multiple scales, from constituent biopolymers to large scale morphology, and their active mechanics is both driven by chiral components and serves to generate chiral morphologies. We describe the mechanics of…
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…
Changes in the geometry and topology of self-assembled membranes underlie diverse processes across cellular biology and engineering. Similar to lipid bilayers, monolayer colloidal membranes have in-plane fluid-like dynamics and out-of-plane…
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…
Biological organisms often have elongated, flexible structures with some degree of chirality in their bodies or movements. In nature, these organisms frequently take advantage of self-encapsulation mechanisms that create folded…