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Multicomponent phase separation is a routine occurrence in both living and synthetic systems. Thermodynamics provides a straightforward path to determine the phase boundaries that characterize these transitions for systems at equilibrium.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-08 Yu-Jen Chiu , Daniel Evans , Ahmad K. Omar

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2025-04-03 Riccardo Rossetto , Gerrit Wellecke , David Zwicker

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-10-15 Vikki Anand Varma , Alberto Scacchi

Liquid-liquid phase separation plays a major role in the formation and maintenance of various membrane-less subcellular structures in the cytoplasm and nucleus of cells. Biological condensates contain enhanced concentrations of proteins and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-10-03 Paul C Bressloff

Active systems, or active matter, are self-driven systems which live, or function, far from equilibrium - a paradigmatic example which we focus on here is provided by a suspension of self-motile particles. Active systems are far from…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-05-19 Giuseppe Gonnella , Davide Marenduzzo , Antonio Suma , Adriano Tiribocchi

Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…

Subcellular Processes · Quantitative Biology 2015-05-20 Pierre Sens , Matthew S. Turner

Phase separation in a low-density gas-like phase and a high-density liquid-like one is a common trait of biological and synthetic self-propelling particles' systems. The competition between motility and stochastic forces is assumed to fix…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-04-15 Pin Nie , Joyjit Chattoraj , Antonio Piscitelli , Patrick Doyle , Ran Ni , Massimo Pica Ciamarra

Active matter is not only indispensable to our understanding of diverse biological processes, but also provides a fertile ground for discovering novel physics. Many emergent properties impossible for equilibrium systems have been…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-05-27 Thibault Bertrand , Chiu Fan Lee

Adding a non-adsorbing polymer to passive colloids induces an attraction between the particles via the `depletion' mechanism. High enough polymer concentrations lead to phase separation. We combine experiments, theory and simulations to…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-07-13 J. Schwarz-Linek , C. Valeriani , A. Cacciuto , M. E. Cates , D. Marenduzzo , A. N. Morozov , W. C. K. Poon

Living systems routinely consume energy to achieve motility, often using intricate biomolecular machinery. In this work, we show that active droplets can sustain indefinite self-propulsion of a spherical colloid in an otherwise homogeneous,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-01 Benjamin Sorkin , Ned S. Wingreen

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,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-03-12 Chengjie Luo , Yicheng Qiang , David Zwicker

Studies of active matter, from molecular assemblies to animal groups, have revealed two broad classes of behavior: a tendency to align yields orientational order and collective motion, whereas particle repulsion leads to self-trapping and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-11-23 Jie Zhang , Ricard Alert , Jing Yan , Ned S. Wingreen , Steve Granick

Coupling between chemical fuel consumption and phase separation can lead to condensation at a nonequilibrium steady state, resulting in phase behaviors that are not described by equilibrium thermodynamics. Theoretical models of such…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-05-23 Yongick Cho , William M. Jacobs

The sustenance of life depends on the high degree of organization that prevails through different levels of living organisms, from subcellular structures such as biomolecular complexes and organelles to tissues and organs. The physical…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-01-14 Hanieh Falahati , Amir Haji-Akbari

Biological mixtures such as the cytosol may consist of thousands of distinct components. There is now a substantial body of evidence showing that, under physiological conditions, intracellular mixtures can phase separate into spatially…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-03-06 William M. Jacobs , Daan Frenkel

Using an analytically tractable lattice model for reaction-diffusion processes of hard-core particles we demonstrate that under nonequilibrium conditions phase coexistence may arise even if the system is effectively one-dimensional as e.g.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Fatemeh Tabatabaei , Gunter M. Schütz

We present the Brownian dynamics simulation of active colloidal suspension in two dimensions, where the self-propulsion speed of a colloid is regulated according to the local density sensed by it. The role of concentration-dependent…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-01-29 Francis Jose , Shalabh K. Anand , Sunil P. Singh

Phase separation routinely occurs in both living and synthetic systems. These phases are often complex and distinguished by features including crystallinity, nematic order, and a host of other nonconserved order parameters. For systems at…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-08 Daniel Evans , Ahmad K. Omar

Biomolecules composed of a limited set of chemical building blocks can co-localize into distinct, spatially segregated compartments known as biomolecular condensates. While many condensates are known to form spontaneously via phase…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-08-15 Fan Chen , William M. Jacobs

Differences in activities in colloidal particles are sufficient to drive phase separation between active and passive (or less active) particles, even if they have only excluded volume interactions. In this paper, we study the phase…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-05-27 Efe Ilker , Jean-François Joanny