Related papers: Size control guidelines for chemically active drop…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
Compartmentalizing reagents within small droplets is promising for highly efficient conversion and simplified procedures in many biphasic chemical reactions. In this work, surface nanodroplets (i.e., less than 100 nm in their maximal…
Living cells use phase separation and concentration gradients to organize chemical compartments in space. Here, we present a theoretical study of droplet dynamics in gradient systems. We derive the corresponding growth law of droplets and…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
Binary droplet collisions are of importance in a variety of practical applications comprising dispersed two-phase flows. The background of our research is the prediction of properties of particulate products formed in spray processes. To…
Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…
We introduce a model of chemically active particles of a multi-component fluid that can change their interactions with other particles depending on their state. Since such switching of interactions can only be maintained by the input of…
Liquid droplet dynamics are widely used in biological and engineering applications, which contain complex interfacial instabilities and pattern formation such as droplet merging, splitting, and transport. This paper studies a class of mean…
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,…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
Pinning of liquid droplets on solid substrates is ubiquitous and plays an essential role in many applications, especially in various areas, such as microfluidics and biology. Although pinning can often reduce the efficiency of various…
Various rod-shaped bacteria such as the canonical gram negative Escherichia coli or the well-studied gram positive Bacillus subtilis divide symmetrically after they approximately double their volume. Their size at division is not constant,…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to…
Accurately determining and classifying the structure of complex networks is the focus of much current research. One class of network of particular interest are metabolic pathways, which have previously been studied from a graph theoretical…
Spraying is a widely used method to produce a liquid sheet that break up into droplets of a certain size distribution. When spraying simple liquids, it is known which experimental parameters determine the droplet size distribution. For many…
We propose a kind of reaction-diffusion equations for cell differentiation, which exhibits the Turing instability. If the diffusivity of some variables is set to be infinity, we get coupled competitive reaction-diffusion equations with a…
Bacteria are highly adaptive microorganisms that thrive in a wide range of growth conditions via changes in cell morphologies and macromolecular composition. How bacterial morphologies are regulated in diverse environmental conditions is a…
Controllability of chemical reactions is an important problem in chemical engineering science. In control theory, analysis of the controllability of linear systems is well-founded, however the dynamics of chemical reactions is usually…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…