Related papers: General approach for partitioning and phase separa…
Biomolecular condensates constitute a newly recognized form of spatial organization in living cells. Although many condensates are believed to form as a result of phase separation, the physicochemical properties that determine the phase…
We theoretically study mixtures of chemically-interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
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…
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,…
Phase separation drives the formation of biomolecular condensates in cells, which comprise many components and sometimes possess multiple phases. The equilibrium physics of phase separation is well understood, but many components in…
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…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Phase separation of various materials has been studied for one and a half centuries. In the last two decades, phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids has received enormous attention, due its relevance to cellular functions. However,…
The influence of size differences, shape, mass and persistent motion on phase separation in binary mixtures has been intensively studied. Here we focus on the exclusive role of diffusivity differences in binary mixtures of equal-sized…
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…
Trapping macromolecules in nanopits finds multifarious applications in polymer separation, filtering biomolecules etc. However, tuning the locomotion of polymers in channels of nanoscopic dimensions is greatly restricted by the comparative…
Understanding the (de)mixing behavior of multicomponent lipid bilayers is an important step towards unraveling the nature of spatial composition heterogeneities in cellular membranes and their role in biological function. We use…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
The width of the distribution of species in a polydisperse system is employed in a small-variable expansion, to obtain a well-controlled and compact scheme by which to calculate phase equilibria in multi-phase systems. General and universal…
Biomolecular condensates in cells are often rich in catalytically-active enzymes. This is particularly true in the case of the large enzymatic complexes known as metabolons, which contain different enzymes that participate in the same…
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…
In a companion paper, we put forth a thermodynamic model for complex formation via a chemical reaction involving multiple macromolecular species, which may subsequently undergo liquid-liquid phase separation and a further transition into a…
Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that occurs ubiquitously in nature and remains the subject of continuous research interest. Understanding diffusion is a key to understanding leaving systems. In this Chapter, I discuss diffusion of…
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…