Related papers: Phase Separation on Deformable Membranes: interpla…
In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we…
A continuum electromechanical model is proposed to describe the membrane curvature induced by electrostatic interactions in a solvated protein-membrane system. The model couples the macroscopic strain energy of membrane and the…
The phase-separation occurring in a system of mutually interacting proteins that can bind on specific sites of a chromatin fiber is here investigated. This is achieved by means of extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations of a simple polymer…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
While modern structural biology has provided us with a rich and diverse picture of membrane proteins, the biological function of membrane proteins is often influenced by the mechanical properties of the surrounding lipid bilayer. Here we…
Phase separation of a liquid mixture embedded within an elastic network is relevant to a wide range of natural and industrial systems, including biomolecular condensates interacting with the cytoskeleton, structural colouring in bird…
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,…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has emerged as a fundamental mechanism underlying intracellular organization, with evidence for it being reported in numerous different systems. However, there is a growing concern regarding the lack of…
Biomembranes wrapping cells and organelles are not only the partitions that separate the insides but also dynamic fields for biological functions accompanied by membrane shape changes. In this review, we discuss the spatiotemporal patterns…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
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…
Membrane proteins are crucial in regulating biomembrane shapes and controlling the dynamic changes in membrane morphology during essential cellular processes. These proteins can localize to regions with their preferred curvatures (curvature…
Biological membranes are dynamic surfaces whose shape and function are critically influenced by protein inclusions (PIs). While membrane deformations induced by PIs have been extensively studied in the small-deformation regime, a variety of…
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 reaction-diffusion waves of proteins are known to be involved in fundamental cellular functions, such as cell migration, cell division, and vesicular transportation. In some of these phenomena, pattern formation on the membranes is…
We develop methods for investigating protein drift-diffusion dynamics in heterogeneous cell membranes and the roles played by geometry, diffusion, chemical kinetics, and phase separation. Our hybrid stochastic numerical methods combine…
Membrane proteins often form dimers and higher-order oligomers whose stability and spatial organization depend sensitively on their lipid environment. To investigate the physical principles underlying this coupling, we employ a lattice…
Biomembranes, which are mainly composed of neutral and charged lipids, exhibit a large variety of functional structures and dynamics. Here, we report a coarse-grained molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of the phase separation and…
In this paper, phase field models are developed for multi-component vesicle membranes with different lipid compositions and membranes with free boundary. These models are used to simulate the deformation of membranes under the elastic…