Related papers: Could Living Cells Use Phase Transitions to Proces…
Virtually all cells use energy and ion-specific membrane pumps to maintain large transmembrane gradients of Na$^+$, K$^+$, Cl$^-$, Mg$^{++}$, and Ca$^{++}$. Although they consume up to 1/3 of a cell's energy budget, the corresponding…
Biomolecular condensates are essential for cellular organization and result from phase separation in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Among various models, chemically active droplets play a significant role, consisting of…
Biological cells encode information about their environment through biochemical signaling networks that control their internal state and response. This information is often encoded in the dynamical patterns of the signaling molecules,…
Cells use biochemical networks to translate environmental information into intracellular responses. These responses can be highly dynamic, but how the information is encoded in these dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate…
The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…
The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…
The dynamic interplay between collective cell movement and the various molecules involved in the accompanying cell signalling mechanisms plays a crucial role in many biological processes including normal tissue development and pathological…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
Cells with the same genome can exist in different phenotypes. and can change between distinct phenotypes when subject to specific stimuli and microenvironments. Some examples include cell differentiation during development, reprogramming…
Molecular simulations and biophysical experiments can be used to provide independent and complementary insights into the molecular origin of biological processes. A particularly useful strategy is to use molecular simulations as a modelling…
Living systems, from single cells to higher vertebrates, receive a continuous stream of non-stationary inputs that they sense, e.g., via cell surface receptors or sensory organs. Integrating these time-varying, multi-sensory, and often…
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…
Cell division is an essential biological process, and regulation of cell division is of relevance for many important fields of biology and medicine. Introducing exogenous substances, such as nanoparticles, into the nucleus, has been…
The computational treatment of many-electron systems capable of exchanging {electrons and nuclei} with the environment represents one of the outermost frontiers in simulation methodology. The exchanging process occurs in a large variety of…
During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Computer simulations of coarse-grained molecular models for amphiphilic systems can provide insight into the the structure of amphiphiles at interfaces. They can help to identify the factors that determine the phase behavior, and they can…
Cells are constantly exposed to fluctuating environmental conditions. External signals are sensed, processed and integrated by cellular signal transduction networks, which translate input signals into specific cellular responses by means of…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Living systems, particularly multicellular systems, often seem hopelessly complex. But recent studies have suggested that beneath this complexity, there may be unifying quantitative principles that we are only now starting to unravel. All…