Related papers: Chemically active droplets in crowded environments

Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…

The activity of biological cells is primarily based on chemical reactions and typically modeled as a reaction-diffusion system. Cells are, however, highly crowded with macromolecules, including a variety of molecular machines such as…

Biomolecular condensates play a central role in the spatial organization of living matter. Their formation is now well understood as a form of liquid-liquid phase separation that occurs very far from equilibrium. For instance, they can be…

The cytoplasm of a living cell is crowded with several macromolecules of different shapes and sizes. Molecular diffusion in such a medium becomes anomalous due to the presence of macromolecules and diffusivity is expected to decrease with…

Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that occurs ubiquitously in nature and remains the subject of continuous research interest. Understanding diffusion is a key to understanding leaving systems. In this Chapter, I discuss diffusion of…

While experiments and computer simulations to study biological phenomena are usually performed in diluted in vitro conditions, such phenomena happen inside the cell, an environment densely packed with diverse macromolecules. Here, we revise…

We present a multiscale approach to model diffusion in a crowded environment and its effect on the reaction rates. Diffusion in biological systems is often modeled by a discrete space jump process in order to capture the inherent noise of…

It is now well established that the cell is a highly crowded environment. Yet, the effects of crowding on the dynamics of signaling pathways, gene regulation networks and metabolic networks are still largely unknown. Crowding can alter both…

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…

Experimental studies of systems containing active proteins that undergo conformational changes driven by catalytic chemical reactions have shown that the diffusion coefficients of passive tracer particles and active molecules are larger…

Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…

We consider a linear polymer chain in a disordered environment modeled by percolation clusters on a square lattice. The disordered environment is meant to roughly represent molecular crowding as seen in cells. The model may be viewed as the…

Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…

Phase separation, crucial for spatially segregating biomolecules in cells, is well-understood in the simple case of a few components with pairwise interactions. Yet, biological cells challenge the simple picture in at least two ways: First,…

Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…

During the life cycle of bacterial cells the non-mixing of the two ring-shaped daughter genomes is an important prerequisite for the cell division process. Mimicking the environments inside highly crowded biological cells, we study the…

This chapter focuses on the mathematical modelling of active particles (or agents) in crowded environments. We discuss several microscopic models found in literature and the derivation of the respective macroscopic partial differential…

Macromolecular crowding plays a principal role in a wide range of biological processes including gene expression, chromosomal compaction, and viral infection. However, the impact that crowding has on the dynamics of nucleic acids remains a…

Collective behaviors such as swarming, chemical signaling, and clustering are fundamental to biological microorganisms, enabling hierarchical colony formation, coordinated motion, and enhanced nutrient accessibility crucial for their…

Macromolecular crowding affects biophysical processes as diverse as diffusion, gene expression, cell growth, and senescence. Yet, there is no comprehensive understanding of how crowding affects reactions, particularly multivalent binding.…