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Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…
Area-selective atomic layer deposition (AS-ALD) is an emerging technology in semiconductor manufacturing. However, accurately understanding inhibitor reactivity on surfaces remains challenging, particularly when the substrate is amorphous.…
The stacking of different 2D materials provides a promising approach to realize new states of quantum matter. In this combined scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and density functional theory (DFT) study we show that the structure in…
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…
We address the effect of functionalization on the electronic and magnetic properties of magnetite surface as an indicator of the same properties in nanoparticles too big for a direct ab-initio approach. Using well-established methods and…
The possibility of controlling the interfacial properties of artificial oxide heterostructures is still attracting researchers in the field of materials engineering. Here, we used surface sensitive techniques and high-resolution…
Nanostructured electronic devices, such as those based on graphene, are typically grown on top of the insulator SiO2. Their exposure to a flux of small size-selected silver nanoparticles has revealed remarkably selective adhesion: the…
Graphdiynes (GDYs) represent a class of 2D carbon materials based on sp-sp$^2$ hybridization with appealing properties and potential applications. Recent advances have demonstrated the experimental self-assembly of GDYs on metal substrates.…
Density functional theory has been employed to study graphene on the (111), (100) and (110) surfaces of silicon (Si) substrates. There are several interesting findings. First, carbon atoms in graphene form covalent bonds with Si atoms, when…
We developed functional surfaces of laser-microstructured silicon coated with blends of polystyrene (PS) and poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) and we study their switching wetting behavior between hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity. Large…
The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…
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…
Semiflexible polymers form central structures in biological material. Modeling approaches usually neglect influences of polymer-specific molecular features aiming to describe semiflexible polymers universally. Here, we investigate the…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
The non-covalent functionalisation of graphene is an attractive strategy to alter the surface chemistry of graphene without damaging its superior electrical and mechanical properties. Using the facile method of aqueous-phase…
Through the utilization of smart materials and well-designed structures, functional surfaces have been developed to enable small-scale liquid/solid manipulation tasks, thereby facilitating crucial applications in the fields of…
We present an ab initio study of the structural and electronic properties of styrene molecules adsorbed on the dimerized Si(100) surface at different coverages, ranging from the single-molecule to the full monolayer. The adsorption…
Biological membranes are complex, dynamic structures essential for cellular compartmentalization, signaling, and mechanical integrity. The molecular organization of eukaryotic membranes has been extensively studied, including the lipid…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
Reversible control of surface wettability has wide applications in lab-on-chip systems, tunable optical lenses, and microfluidic tools. Using a graphene sheet as a sample material and molecular dynamic (MD) simulations, we demonstrate that…