Related papers: Theoretical limits for sensing through phase separ…
Flowing granular materials segregate due to differences in particle size (driven by percolation) and density (driven by buoyancy). Modelling the segregation of mixtures of large/heavy particles and small/light particles is challenging due…
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…
Phase-separated biomolecular condensates containing proteins and RNAs can assemble into higher-order structures by forming thermodynamically stable interfaces between immiscible phases. Using a minimal model of a protein/RNA interaction…
Despite more than 100 years of study, it is unclear if the movement of proteins inside the cell is best described as a mosh pit or an exquisitely choreographed dance. Recent studies suggest the latter. Local interactions induce molecular…
In living cells, proteins involved in specialized biochemical functions are often spatially organized within biomolecular condensates. Increasing evidence suggests that some of these condensates, including DNA repair condensates, emerge…
Conventional phase segregation is controlled by a positive interfacial tension, which implies that the system relaxes towards a state in which the interfacial area (or length) is minimized, typically manifesting as a single droplet that…
Liquid-liquid phase separation, whereby two liquids spontaneously demix, is ubiquitous in industrial, environmental, and biological processes. While isotropic fluids are known to condense into spherical droplets in the binodal region, these…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
Spontaneous phase separation, or demixing, is important in biological phenomena such as cell sorting. In particle-based models, an open question is whether differences in diffusivity can drive such demixing. While…
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…
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,…
Molecular sorting is a fundamental process that allows eukaryotic cells to distill and concentrate specific chemical factors in appropriate cell membrane subregions, thus endowing them with different chemical identities and functional…
We present a novel Monte Carlo simulation of the phase separation dynamics of a model fluid membrane. Such a phase segregation induces shape changes of the membrane and results in local `budding' under favourable conditions. We present a…
Stress granules (SG) are droplets of proteins and RNA that form in the cell cytoplasm during stress conditions. We consider minimal models of stress granule formation based on the mechanism of phase separation regulated by ATP-driven…
The phase separation mechanism of a binary liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap is nucleation and growth, its homogeneous phase reaching a metastable equilibrium state. The successive stages of growth of the…
Phase separation is not only ubiquitous in diverse physical systems, but also plays an important organizational role inside biological cells. However, experimental studies of intracellular condensates (drops with condensed concentrations of…
This article focuses on phase and aggregation behavior for linear chains composed of blocks of hydrophilic and hydrophobic segments. Phase and conformational transitions of patterned chains are relevant for understanding liquid-liquid…
Demixing of multicomponent biomolecular systems via liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) has emerged as a potentially unifying mechanism governing the formation of several membrane-less intracellular organelles ("condensates"), both in the…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
Living cells sense noisy biochemical signals crucial for survival, yet models incorporating intracellular signaling are limited. This study examines how cells sense chemotactic concentrations through phosphorylation readouts in Ca2+…