Related papers: Liquid-liquid phase separation enables highly sele…
Living cells exhibit a complex organization comprising numerous compartments, among which are RNA- and protein-rich membraneless, liquid-like organelles known as biomolecular condensates. Energy-consuming processes regulate their formation…
Evidence accumulated over the past decade provides support for liquid-liquid phase separation as the mechanism underlying the formation of biomolecular condensates, which include not only membraneless organelles such as nucleoli and RNA…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Computational methods for discovering patterns of local correlations in sequences are important in computational biology. Here we show how to determine the optimal partitioning of aligned sequences into non-overlapping segments such that…
During interphase, a typical cell nucleus features spatial compartmentalization of transcriptionally active euchromatin and repressed heterochromatin domains. In conventional nuclear organization, euchromatin predominantly occupies the…
Phase separation of intrinsically disordered proteins is important for the formation of membraneless organelles, or biomolecular condensates, which play key roles in the regulation of biochemical processes within cells. In this work, we…
Active transport of biomolecular condensates and cell migration in collectives are fundamental to development, homeostasis, and processes such as cancer progression, wound healing, and infection response. Yet how these assemblies are…
Many biological materials must couple mechanical strength with the ability to rapidly self-assemble at a specific location. In particular, biomolecular condensates readily self-assemble via phase separation, but may also need to resist…
The formation of condensates is now considered as a major organization principle of eukaryotic cells. Several studies have recently shown that the properties of these condensates are affected by enzymatic reactions. We propose here a simple…
DNA is an ideal candidate to organize matter on the nanoscale, primarily due to the specificity and complexity of DNA based interactions. Recent advances in this direction include the self-assembly of colloidal crystals using DNA grafted…
The volume occupied by unconstrained bacterial DNA in physiological solutions exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Still, it is confined to a well defined region of the cell called the nucleoid, which occupies only a fraction of the…
Fractionation is necessary for self-assembly in multicomponent mixtures. Here, reversible fractionation and crystallization are realized and studied in a two-dimensional binary colloids which is supersaturated by enhancing the attraction…
Many spherical viruses encapsulate their genome in protein shells with icosahedral symmetry. This process is spontaneous and driven by electrostatic interactions between positive domains on the virus coat proteins and the negative genome.…
The majority of viruses are organised according to the structural blueprints of the seminal Caspar-Klug theory. However, there are a number of notable exceptions to this geometric design principle. Prominent examples are the cancer-causing…
The canonical bacteriophage is obligately lytic: the virus infects a bacterium and hijacks cell functions to produce large numbers of new viruses which burst from the cell. These viruses are well-studied, but there exist a wide range of…
We report on the construction of multiarm colloidal molecules by tip-linking filamentous bacteriophages, functionalized either by biological engineering or chemical conjugation. The affinity for streptavidin of a genetically modified vector…
Membrane budding and wrapping of particles, such as viruses and nano-particles, play a key role in intracellular transport and have been studied for a variety of biological and soft matter systems. We study nano-particle wrapping by…
The emergence of functional oligonucleotides on early Earth required a molecular selection mechanism to screen for specific sequences with prebiotic functions. Cyclic processes such as daily temperature oscillations were ubiquitous in this…
The statistical mechanics of a treelike polymer in a confining volume is relevant to the packaging of the genome in RNA viruses. Making use of the mapping of the grand partition function of this system onto the statistical mechanics of a…
We demonstrate a novel route of spatially organizing the colloid arrangements on the polymer-grafted substrate by use of self-consistent field and density functional theories. We find that grafting of polymers onto a substrate can…