Related papers: Theoretical limits for sensing through phase separ…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is key to understanding aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) arising throughout cell biology, medical science, and the pharmaceutical industry. Controlling the detailed morphology of phase-separating compound…
Bosonic condensates offer exciting prospects for studies of non-equilibrium quantum dynamics. Understanding the dynamics is particularly challenging in the sub-picosecond timescales typical for room temperature luminous driven-dissipative…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Condensation is an important aspect of many flow applications due to the universal presence of humidity in the air at ambient conditions. For direct numerical simulations of such flows, simulating the gas phase as a mixture characterized by…
We introduce a simple zero-range process with constant rates and one fast rate for a particular occupation number, which diverges with the system size. Surprisingly, this minor modification induces a condensation transition in the…
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…
The deluge of single-cell data obtained by sequencing, imaging and epigenetic markers has led to an increasingly detailed description of cell state. However, it remains challenging to identify how cells transition between different states,…
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…
In many biological processes heterogeneity within cell populations is an important issue. In this work we consider populations where the behavior of every single cell can be described by a system of ordinary differential equations.…
Cells respond to chemical cues, and the precision with which they can sense these cues is fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of diffusion and ligand binding. Berg and Purcell famously investigated how well a small sensor in an…
Physical mechanisms of phase separation in living systems can play key physiological roles and have recently been the focus of intensive studies. The strongly heterogeneous and disordered nature of such phenomena in the biological domain…
We study condensation transitions in the steady state of a zero-range process with two species of particles. The steady state is exactly soluble -- it is given by a factorised form provided the dynamics satisfy certain constraints -- and we…
We perform simulations of a system containing simple model proteins and a polymer representing chromatin. We study the interplay between protein-protein and protein-chromatin interactions, and the resulting condensates which arise due to…
Proteins and nucleic acids can spontaneously self-assemble into membraneless droplet-like compartments, both in vitro and in vivo. A key component of these droplets are multi-valent proteins that possess several adhesive domains with…
The cellular cytoplasm is organized into compartments. Phase separation is a simple manner to create membrane-less compartments in order to confine and localize particles like proteins. In many cases these particles are bound to fluctuating…
Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases…
We study condensation in one-dimensional transport models with a kinetic constraint. The kinetic constraint results in clustering of immobile vehicles; these clusters can grow to macroscopic condensates, indicating the onset of dynamic…
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…
Phase separating systems that are maintained away from thermodynamic equilibrium via molecular processes represent a class of active systems, which we call active emulsions. These systems are driven by external energy input for example…
Living cells communicate information about physiological conditions by producing signaling molecules in a specific timed manner. Different conditions can result in the same total amount of a signaling molecule, differing only in the pattern…