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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,…
Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) is important to control a wide range of reactions from gene expression to protein degradation in a cell-sized space. To bring a better understanding of the compatibility of such phase-separated…
We propose a continuum theory of the liquid-liquid phase separation in an elastic network where phase-separated microscopic droplets rich in one fluid component can form as an interplay of fluids mixing, droplet nucleation, network…
Liquid liquid phase separation (LLPS) of proteins is an intracellular process that is widely used by cells for many purposes. In living cells (in vivo), LLPS occurs in complex and crowded environments. Amino acids (AAs) are vital components…
Demixing of multicomponent biomolecular systems via liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) has emerged as a potentially unifying mechanism governing the formation of several membrane-less intracellular organelles ("condensates"), both in the…
Proteins and nucleic acids can spontaneously self-assemble into membraneless droplet-like compartments, both in vitro and in vivo. A key component of these droplets are multi-valent proteins that possess several adhesive domains with…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Biomolecular condensates, physically underpinned to a significant extent by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), are now widely recognized by numerous experimental studies to be of fundamental biological, biomedical, and biophysical…
A theory for sequence dependent liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) in the study of biomolecular condensates is formulated by extending the random phase approximation (RPA) and field-theoretic…
We consider two (2D) and three (3D) dimensional granular systems exposed to compression, and ask what is the influence of the number of physical dimensions on the properties of the interaction networks that spontaneously form as these…
In view of the notorious complexity of protein--protein interactions, simplified models of proteins treated as patchy particles offer a promising strategy to obtain insight into the mechanism of crystallization. Here we report…
Microscopic dynamics of complex fluids in the early stage of spinodal decomposition (SD) is strongly intertwined with the kinetics of structural evolution, which makes a quantitative characterization challenging. In this work, we use x-ray…
We investigate liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) and interfacial properties of two LLPS modes: associative (ALLPS) and segregative (SLLPS). Analytical expressions for the critical point (CP) and binodal boundaries are derived and show…
The formation of biomolecular condensates inside cells often involve intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), and several of these IDPs are also capable of forming droplet-like dense assemblies on their own, through liquid-liquid phase…
The assembly of functional biomolecular condensates often involves liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of proteins with multiple modular domains, which can be folded or conformationally disordered to various degrees. To understand the…
The observation of Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation (LLPS) in biological cells has dramatically shifted the paradigm that soluble proteins are uniformly dispersed in the cytoplasm or nucleoplasm. The LLPS region is preceded by a one-phase…
Evaporation alters the molecular interactions and leads to phase separation within the evaporating liquid. The question of whether evaporation could lead to specific phase separation at the liquid interface and eventually to the formation…
Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) is currently of great interest in cell biology. LLPS is an example of what is called an emergent phenomenon -- an idea that comes from condensed-matter physics. Emergent phenomena have the…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
Employing X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy we measure the kinetics and dynamics of a pressure-induced liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) in a water-lysozyme solution. Scattering invariants and kinetic information provide evidence…