Related papers: Mesoscopic heterogeneity in biomolecular condensat…
Coarsening, the process where larger structures grow at the expense of smaller ones, is a fundamental aspect of multiphase systems. The cell cytoplasm exemplifies an out-of-equilibrium multiphase system, where phase-separated condensates…
We studied how the inhomogeneity of a sequence affects the phase transition that takes place at DNA melting. Unlike previous works, which considered thermodynamic quantities averaged over many different inhomogeneous sequences, we focused…
Biomolecular phase separation is typically attributed to the polymer physics of long, disordered chains. However, the underlying chemical grammar, i.e. the specific interactions between protein and RNA building blocks, remains poorly…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…
Collective behavior of proteins on biomembranes is usually studied within the spontaneous curvature model. Here we consider an alternative phenomenological approach, which accounts consistently for partial ordering of proteins as well as…
The well known phenomenon of phase separation in synthetic polymers and proteins has become a major topic in biophysics because it has been invoked as a mechanism of compartment formation in cells, without the need for membranes. Most of…
The conventional wisdom is that liquids are completely disordered and lack non-trivial structure beyond nearest-neighbor distances. Recent observations have upended this view and demonstrated that the microstructure in liquids is…
An autocatalytic pattern matching polymer system is studied as an abstract model for chemical ecosystem evolution. Highly ordered populations with particular sequence patterns appear spontaneously out of a vast number of possible states.…
Scalable manufacturing of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is essential for industrial-scale production of cell therapies and regenerative medicines. However, the 3D aggregate cultures used in manufacturing exhibit substantial…
Heterogeneity in biological molecules, resulting in molecule-to-molecule variations in their dynamics and function, is an emerging theme. To elucidate the consequences of heterogeneous behavior at the single molecule level, we propose an…
Biologically functional liquid-liquid phase separation of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) is driven by interactions encoded by their amino acid sequences. Little is currently known about the molecular recognition mechanisms for…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
The process of protein search for specific binding sites on DNA is fundamentally important since it marks the beginning of all major biological processes. We present a theoretical investigation that probes the role of DNA sequence symmetry,…
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) abound in cellular regulation. Their interactions are often transitory and highly sensitive to salt concentration and posttranslational modifications. However, little is known about the effect of…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
In the course of evolution, proteins undergo important changes in their amino acid sequences, while their three-dimensional folded structure and their biological function remain remarkably conserved. Thanks to modern sequencing techniques,…
Many active biological particles, such as swimming microorganisms or motor-proteins, do work on their environment by going though a periodic sequence of shapes. Interactions between particles can lead to the phase-synchronization of their…
Bacteriophages densely pack their long dsDNA genome inside a protein capsid. The conformation of the viral genome inside the capsid is consistent with a hexagonal liquid crystalline structure. Experiments have confirmed that the details of…
Biomolecular condensates play essential roles in cellular processes, and recent efforts have focused on understanding their assembly and rational design principles. In this study, we have employed an explicit-solvent minimal statistical…
Competing interactions stabilize exotic mesoscopic structures, yet the microscopic mechanisms by which they influence non-equilibrium processes leading to disordered states remain largely unexplored, despite their critical role in…