Related papers: Active droplets controlled by enzymatic reactions
Endothelial cells are responsible for the formation of the capillary blood vessel network. We describe a system of endothelial cells by means of two-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of point-like particles. Cells' motion is…
The coffee-ring effect is a universal feature of evaporating sessile droplets with pinned contact line, wherein solutes or particles are advected to the droplet's edge due to evaporation-driven flows. While existing models have successfully…
Recent experiments have revealed that cytoplasms become glassy when their metabolism is suppressed, while they maintain fluidity in a living state. The mechanism of this active fluidization is not clear, especially for bacterial cytoplasms,…
Protein aggregation is of particular interest due to its connection with many diseases and disorders. Many factors can alter the dynamics and result of this process, one of them being the diffusivity of the monomers and aggregates in the…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
Self-assembly of proteins is a biological phenomenon which gives rise to spontaneous formation of amyloid fibrils or polymers. The starting point of this phase, called nucleation exhibits an important variability among replicated…
The theory for manifestation of stochastic appearance of embryos in the global decay of metastable phase has been constructed. The regime of droplets growth is supposed to be both free molecular one and diffusion one. The deviation for a…
In a companion paper, we put forth a thermodynamic model for complex formation via a chemical reaction involving multiple macromolecular species, which may subsequently undergo liquid-liquid phase separation and a further transition into a…
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…
Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…
We study the behaviour of catalytically active droplets in multi-component conserved mixtures affected by noise. Working in the thin interface limit, we analytically determine the state diagram of the system, characterized by multiple…
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…
Biomolecular condensates provide distinct chemical environments, which control various cellular processes. The diffusive dynamics and chemical kinetics inside phase-separated condensates can be studied experimentally by fluorescently…
Fluorescence microscopy reveals that the contents of many (membrane-free) nuclear "bodies" exchange rapidly with the soluble pool whilst the underlying structure persists; such observations await a satisfactory biophysical explanation. To…
The formation of local denaturation zones (bubbles) in double-stranded DNA is an important example for conformational changes of biological macromolecules. We study the dynamics of bubble formation in terms of a Fokker-Planck equation for…
The eukaryotic cell nucleus harbors the DNA genome that is organized in a dynamic chromatin network and embedded in a viscous crowded fluid. This environment directly affects enzymatic reactions and target search processes that access the…
We unravel the ground state properties and emergent non-equilibrium dynamics of a mixture consisting of a few spin-polarized fermions embedded in a two-dimensional bosonic quantum droplet. For an increasingly attractive droplet-fermion…
Understanding chromatin organization and dynamics is important since they crucially affect DNA functions. In this study, we investigate chromatin dynamics by statistically analyzing single-nucleosome movement in living human cells. Bi-modal…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
These lecture notes describe a basic theory of chemically active droplets, which are droplets kept away from equilibrium by driven chemical reactions. The notes assume a basic familiarity with equilibrium thermodynamics of phase separation,…