Related papers: Active droplets controlled by enzymatic reactions

Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases…

Inspired by recent experiments on chromosomal dynamics, we introduce an exactly solvable model for the interaction between a flexible polymer and a set of motor-like enzymes. The enzymes can bind and unbind to specific sites of the polymer…

The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…

Droplet microfluidics, in which micro-droplets serve as individual reactors, has enabled a wide range of high-throughput biochemical processes. Unlike solid wells typically used in current biochemical assays, droplets are subject to…

The thermodynamics of proteins indicate that folding/unfolding takes place either through stable intermediates or through a two-state process without intermediates. The rather short folding times of the two-state process indicate that…

The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…

Mechanochemically active enzymes change their shapes within every turnover cycle. Therefore, they induce circulating flows in the solvent around them and behave as oscillating hydrodynamic force dipoles. Because of non-equilibrium…

Biomolecular condensates are cellular phase-separated droplets that usually exhibit a viscoelastic mechanical response. A behavior rationalized by modeling the complex molecules that make up a condensate as stickers and spacers, which…

Enzymes show two distinct transport behaviors in the presence of their substrates in solution. First, their diffusivity enhances with increasing substrate concentration. In addition, enzymes perform directional motion toward regions with…

Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…

We consider the dynamics of a model introduced recently by Bialas, Burda and Johnston. At equilibrium the model exhibits a transition between a fluid and a condensed phase. For long evolution times the dynamics of condensation possesses a…

We consider a random model of diffusion and coagulation. A large number of small particles are randomly scattered at an initial time. Each particle has some integer mass and moves in a Brownian motion whose diffusion rate is determined by…

We study the rolling and sliding motion of droplets on a corrugated substrate by Molecular Dynamics simulations. Droplets are driven by an external body force (gravity) and we investigate the velocity profile and dissipation mechanisms in…

Many protein systems fold in a two-state manner. Random models, however, rarely display two-state kinetics and thus such behavior should not be accepted as a default. To date, many theories for the prevalence of two-state kinetics have been…

Enzyme-catalysed reactions involve two distinct timescales. There is a short timescale on which enzymes bind to substrate molecules to produce bound complexes, and a comparatively long timescale on which the complex is transformed into a…

We investigate three aspects of aerosol-mediated air-borne viral infection mechanisms on different length and time scales. First, we address the evolution of the size distribution of a non-interacting ensemble of droplets that are subject…

Pattern formation in drying protein droplets continues to attract considerable research attention because it can be linked to specific protein-protein interactions. An extensive study of the drying evolution and the final crack patterns are…

The encapsulation of active particles, such as bacteria or active colloids, inside a droplet gives rise to nontrivial shape dynamics and droplet motility. To understand this behavior, we derive an asymptotic solution for the fluid flow…

We study the enzymatic degradation of an elastic fiber under tension using an an isotropic random-walk model, coupled with binding-unbinding reactions that weaken the fiber. The fiber is represented by a chain of elastic springs in series,…

Ternary interactions between hetero-fluid particles, particularly the dynamics of droplets spreading over curved fluid interfaces remain insufficiently understood compared to the two-phase coalescence. In this study, we combine lattice…