Related papers: Beyond Pairwise: Higher-order physical interaction…
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…
Heterogeneities in the cell membrane due to coexisting lipid phases have been conjectured to play a major functional role in cell signaling and membrane trafficking. Thereby the material properties of multiphase systems, such as the line…
Unlike fluids at thermal equilibrium, biomolecular mixtures in living systems can sustain nonequilibrium steady states, in which active processes modify the conformational states of the constituent molecules. Despite qualitative…
The formation of polarized signaling domains on cell membranes is a fundamental example of biological pattern formation. While such patterns resemble structures from equilibrium phase separation, they are intrinsically non-equilibrium,…
Recent experimental realizations of liquid-liquid phase separation of active liquid crystals have offered an insight into the interaction between phase separation, ubiquitous in soft matter and biology, and chaotic active flows. In this…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
Modern materials are often synthesized or operated in complex chemical environments, where there can be numerous elemental species, competing phases, and reaction pathways. When analyzing reactions using the Gibbs free energy, which has a…
Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…
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,…
Biomolecular condensates form by phase separation of biological polymers and have important functions in the cell $-$ functions that are inherently connected to their physical properties. A remarkable aspect of such condensates is that…
We study binary mixtures of small active and big passive athermal particles interacting via soft repulsive forces on a frictional substrate. Athermal self propelled particles are known to phase separate into a dense aggregate and a dilute…
Phase separation of various materials has been studied for one and a half centuries. In the last two decades, phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids has received enormous attention, due its relevance to cellular functions. However,…
We study a coupled driven system in which two species of particles are advected by a fluctuating potential energy landscape. While the particles follow the potential gradient, each species affects the local shape of the landscape in…
Mechanical interactions between biological cells may be mediated by secreted products, making them dependent on the local particle density. Here, we explore the generic physics of density-dependent attractive interactions. We show using…
We perform simulations of a system containing simple model proteins and a polymer representing chromatin. We study the interplay between protein-protein and protein-chromatin interactions, and the resulting condensates which arise due to…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
A two-dimensional system of soft particles interacting via a two-length-scale potential is studied. Density functional theory and Brownian dynamics simulations reveal a fluid phase and two crystalline phases with different lattice spacing.…
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…
Active particles may undergo phase separation when interactions oppose self-propulsion, in the absence of any cohesive forces. The corresponding Motility-Induced Phase Separation (MIPS) is arguably the simplest non-trivial collective…