Related papers: Computer simulations show that liquid-liquid phase…
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…
The fluid phase diagram of trimer particles composed of one central attractive bead and two repulsive beads was determined as a function of simple geometric parameters using flat-histogram Monte Carlo methods. A variety of self-assembled…
Flow transport in confined spaces is ubiquitous in technological processes, ranging from separation and purification of pharmaceutical ingredients by microporous membranes and drug delivery in biomedical treatment to chemical and biomass…
Colloidosomes are created in the laboratory from a Pickering emulsion of water droplets in oil. The colloidosomes have approximately the same diameter and by choosing (hairy) particles of different diameters it is possible to control the…
The control of the thermocapillary assembly of colloidal particle clusters is important for a variety of applications, including the creation of photonic crystals for microelectronics and optoelectronics, membrane formation for…
Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…
Microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, have the ability of colonizing surfaces and developing biofilms that can determine diseases and infections. Most bacteria secrete a significant amount of extracellular polymer substances that are…
The condensation of biomolecules into biomolecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) is a ubiquitous mechanism that drives cellular organization. To enable these functions, biomolecules have evolved to drive LLPS and…
Single-stranded RNA viruses co-assemble their capsid with the genome and variations in capsid structures can have significant functional relevance. In particular, viruses need to respond to a dehydrating environment to prevent genomic…
We present a confocal-microscopy study of demixing and remixing in binary liquids containing colloidal particles. First, particle-stabilized emulsions have been fabricated by nucleation and growth of droplets upon cooling from the…
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…
Self-assembly of sub-micron particles suspended in a water film is investigated numerically. The liquid medium is allowed to evaporate leaving only the sub-micron particles. A coupled CFD-DEM approach is used for the simulation of…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
The self-assembly of molecules at surfaces can be caused by a range of physical mechanisms. Assembly can be driven by intermolecular forces, or molecule-surface forces, or both; it can result in structures that are in equilibrium or that…
We characterize the self-assembly of colloidal particles with surface mobile DNA linkers under kinetically limited valence conditions. For this, we put forward a computer simulation model that captures quantitatively the interplay between…
Motivated by observations of heterogeneous domain structure on the surface of cells, we consider a minimal model to describe the dynamics of phase separation on the surface of a spherical particle. Finite-size effects on the curved particle…
Yield stress fluids are widely used in industrial application to arrest dense solid particles, which can be studied by using a concentrated emulsion as a model fluid. We show in experiments that particle sedimentation in emulsions cannot be…
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…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
Fluid phase equilibria involving nano-dispersed phases, where at least one of the coexisting phases is confined to a small volume, are investigated by molecular dynamics simulation. Complementing previous studies on nanoscopic droplets,…