Related papers: Chemically active droplets in crowded environments
Phase separation, the spontaneous segregation of density, is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed across diverse physical and biological systems. Within a crowd of motile elements, active phase separation emerges from the interplay of activity…
Understanding protein motion within the cell is crucial for predicting reaction rates and macromolecular transport in the cytoplasm. A key question is how crowded environments affect protein dynamics through hydrodynamic and direct…
Macromolecular crowding plays a crucial role in modulating protein dynamics in cellular and in vitro environments. Polymeric crowders such as dextran and Ficoll are known to induce entropic forces, including depletion interactions, that…
We study the dynamics of an ideal polymer chain in a crowded, viscoelastic medium and in the presence of active forces. The motion of the centre of mass and of individual monomers is calculated. On time scales that are comparable to the…
Biomolecular condensates formed through the phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids are widely observed, offering a fundamental means of organizing intracellular materials in a membrane-less fashion. Traditionally, these condensates…
Active networks composed of biopolymers and motor proteins provide versatile biomimetic systems that have advanced active matter physics and deepened our understanding of cytoskeletal dynamics and self-organization under diverse stimuli. In…
The large scale behaviour of a population of cells that grow and interact through the concentration field of the chemicals they secrete is studied using dynamical renormalization group methods. The combination of the effective long-range…
In bacteria, regulatory proteins search for a specific DNA binding target via "facilitated diffusion": a series of rounds of 3D diffusion in the cytoplasm, and 1D linear diffusion along the DNA contour. Using large scale Brownian dynamics…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
We investigate, via Brownian dynamics simulations, the reaction dynamics of a simple, non-linear chemical network (the Willamowski-Rossler network) under spatial confinement and crowding conditions. Our results show that the presence of…
Recent advancements in the ability to construct three-dimensional (3D) tissues and organoids from stem cells and biomaterials have not only opened abundant new research avenues in disease modeling and regenerative medicine but also have…
Macromolecular crowding can influence polymer shapes, which is important for understanding the thermodynamic stability of polymer solutions and the structure and function of biopolymers (proteins, RNA, DNA) under confinement. We explore the…
In intracellular transports, motor proteins transport macromolecules as cargos to desired locations by moving on biopolymers such as microtubules. Recent experiments suggest that cargos that can associate motor proteins during their…
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…
Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established. The…
We study the effect of the crowded nature of the cellular cytoplasm on the translocation of a polymer through a pore in a membrane. By systematically treating the entropic penalty due to crowding, we show that the translocation dynamics are…
In a companion paper, we put forth a thermodynamic model for complex formation via a chemical reaction involving multiple macromolecular species, which may subsequently undergo liquid-liquid phase separation and a further transition into a…
Virtually every biological function emerges through the organization of molecules in time and space. Consequently, a major challenge in statistical physics is to uncover the universal principles governing macromolecular self-organization…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
The physical and chemical environment inside cells is of fundamental importance to all life but has traditionally been difficult to determine on a subcellular basis. Here we combine cutting-edge genomically integrated FRET biosensing to…