Related papers: Enhanced condensate fluidity in modified patchy pa…
We consider the lateral diffusion of a protein interacting with the curvature of the membrane. The interaction energy is minimized if the particle is at a membrane position with a certain curvature that agrees with the spontaneous curvature…
The study of interactions between biomimetic membranes and micron-sized particles is crucial for understanding various biological processes. Here, we control microparticle spontaneous engulfment by giant lipid vesicles by tuning particle…
One of the hypothesized functions of biomolecular condensates is to act as chemical reactors, where chemical reactions can be modulated, i.e. accelerated or slowed down, while substrate molecules enter and products exit from the condensate.…
Discrete simulation methods are efficient tools to investigate the complex behaviors of complex fluids made of either dry granular materials or dilute suspensions. By contrast, materials made of soft and/or concentrated units (emulsions,…
Active transport of biomolecular condensates and cell migration in collectives are fundamental to development, homeostasis, and processes such as cancer progression, wound healing, and infection response. Yet how these assemblies are…
Phase separation of intrinsically disordered proteins is important for the formation of membraneless organelles, or biomolecular condensates, which play key roles in the regulation of biochemical processes within cells. In this work, we…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is key to understanding aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) arising throughout cell biology, medical science, and the pharmaceutical industry. Controlling the detailed morphology of phase-separating compound…
Patchy colloidal model with three and four equivalent patches, confined in the attractive random porous media, undergo re-entrant gas-liquid phase separation with the possibility for the liquid phase density to approach zero. This unusual…
The biomolecules in and around a living cell -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates -- continuously sample myriad conformational states that are thermally accessible at physiological temperatures. Simultaneously, a given…
Compound particles are a class of composite systems in which solid particles encapsulated in a fluid droplet are suspended in another fluid. They are encountered in various natural and biological processes, for e.g., nucleated cells,…
Event-driven molecular dynamics simulations are carried out on two rigid body systems which differ in the symmetry of their molecular mass distributions. First, simulations of methane in which the molecules interact via discontinuous…
Phase separation is as familiar as watching vinegar separating from oil in vinegrette. The observation that phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids is widespread in living cells has opened an entire field of research into the…
We examine the budding of a nanoscale particle through a lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations, free energy calculations, and an elastic theory, with the aim of determining the extent to which equilibrium elasticity theory can…
We draw an analogy between droplet formation in dilute particle and polymer systems. Our arguments are based on finite-size scaling results from studies of a two-dimensional lattice gas to three-dimensional bead-spring polymers. To set the…
Physical mechanisms of phase separation in living systems can play key physiological roles and have recently been the focus of intensive studies. The strongly heterogeneous and disordered nature of such phenomena in the biological domain…
Phase separation drives the formation of biomolecular condensates in cells, which comprise many components and sometimes possess multiple phases. The equilibrium physics of phase separation is well understood, but many components in…
Nano- to micro-sized particles with differently charged surface areas exhibit complex interaction patterns, characterized by both opposite-charge attraction and like-charge repulsion. While several successful models have been proposed in…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
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…