Related papers: Mesoscopic heterogeneity in biomolecular condensat…
Biomolecular condensates are liquid- or gel-like droplets of proteins and nucleic acids formed at least in part through liquid-liquid phase separation. Condensates enable diverse functions of cells and the pathogens that infect them,…
Biological polymers, such as intrinsically disordered proteins, play a central role in cellular biology, including mediating phase separation and controlling activity of biological condensates. The physical properties and functions of…
Drying of biologically-relevant sessile droplets, including passive systems (like DNA and proteins), as well as active microbial systems comprising bacteria and algae, have garnered considerable attention over the last decades. Distinct…
Motivated by the idea that intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) condense into liquid-like droplets within cells, we carry out Monte Carlo simulations of a polymer lattice model to study the relationship between charge patterning and…
Accurate protein structural ensembles can be determined with metainference, a Bayesian inference method that integrates experimental information with prior knowledge of the system and deals with all sources of uncertainty and errors as well…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
Inside a cell, heterotypic proteins assemble in inhomogeneous, crowded systems where the abundance of these proteins vary with cell types. While some protein complexes form putative structures that can be visualized with imaging, there are…
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…
The native conformation of structured proteins is stabilized by a complex network of interactions. We analyzed the elementary patterns that constitute such network and ranked them according to their importance in shaping protein sequence…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…
Compartmentalization is ubiquitous in the broad cellular context, especially in the formation of membraneless organelles (MOs). Membraneless organelles (MOs) are phase-separated liquid compartments that provide spatiotemporal control of…
Mesoscopic density functional theory for inhomogeneous mixtures of sperical particles is developed in terms of mesoscopic volume fractions by a systematic coarse-graining procedure starting form microscopic theory. Approximate expressions…
We demonstrate the possibility of realizing sub-Planck-scale structures in the mesoscopic superposition of molecular wave packets involving vibrational levels. The time evolution of the wave packet, taken here as the SU(2) coherent state of…
A significant part of the proteome is composed of intrinsically-disordered proteins (IDPs). These proteins do not fold into a well-defined structure and behave like ordinary polymers. In this work we consider IDPs which have the tendency to…
We describe a complete methodology to bridge the scales between nanoscale Molecular Dynamics and (micrometer) mesoscale Monte Carlo simulations in lipid membranes and vesicles undergoing phase separation, in which curving molecular species…
Molecular self-assembly plays a very important role in various aspects of technology as well as in biological systems. Governed by the covalent, hydrogen or van der Waals interactions - self-assembly of alike molecules results in a large…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is the mechanism underlying the formation of biomolecular condensates. Disordered protein regions often drive phase separation, but molecular interactions of disordered protein regions are not well understood,…
The separation of substances into different phases is ubiquitous in nature and important scientifically and technologically. This phenomenon may become drastically different if the species involved, whether molecules or supramolecular…
We study the problem of the self-assembly of nanoparticles (NPs) into finite mesoscopic structures with a programmed local morphology and complex overall shape. Our proposed building blocks are NPs directionally-functionalized with DNA. The…
Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…