Related papers: Enzyme-driven phase separation
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 into compositionally and physically distinct domains is ubiquitous in (non)living matter ranging from alloys and emulsions to biomolecular condensates in cells. The organization of these domains can be controlled, for…
In active systems, whose constituents have non-equilibrium dynamics at local level, fluid-fluid phase separation is widely observed. Examples include the formation of membraneless organelles within cells; the clustering of self-propelled…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…
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…
Inspired by recent experiments, we present a phase-field model of microphase separation in an elastomer swollen with a solvent. The imbalance between the molecular scale of demixing and the mesoscopic scale beyond which elasticity operates…
Molecular sorting is a fundamental process that allows eukaryotic cells to distill and concentrate specific chemical factors in appropriate cell membrane subregions, thus endowing them with different chemical identities and functional…
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…
Multi-component membranes such as ternary mixtures of lipids and cholesterol can exhibit coexistence regions between two liquid phases. When such membranes adhere to a corrugated substrate, the phase separation process strongly depends on…
Phase separation plays an role in determining the self-assembly of biological and soft-matter systems. In biological systems, liquid-liquid phase separation inside a cell leads to the formation of various macromolecular aggregates. The…
Materials undergoing both phase separation and chemical reactions (defined here as all processes that change particle type or number) form an important class of non-equilibrium systems. Examples range from suspensions of self-propelled…
Phase separation of a liquid mixture embedded within an elastic network is relevant to a wide range of natural and industrial systems, including biomolecular condensates interacting with the cytoskeleton, structural colouring in bird…
Phase separation driven by nonequilibrium fluctuations is a hallmark of both living and synthetic active matter. Unlike equilibrium systems, where ordered states arise from the minimization of free energy, active systems are fueled by a…
Quenched or frozen-in structural disorder is ubiquitous in real experimental systems. Much of the progress is achieved in understanding the phase separation of such systems using the diffusion-driven coarsening in Ising model with quenched…
Nonequilibrium phase transitions are routinely observed in both natural and synthetic systems. The ubiquity of these transitions highlights the conspicuous absence of a general theory of phase coexistence that is broadly applicable to both…
Chemical activity is known to affect phase coexistence and coarsening in liquid mixtures, most commonly through reaction-induced changes of intermolecular interactions. Here, we analyze a scenario in which chemical reactions regulate…
We study numerically the coarsening dynamics of the Ising model on a regular lattice with random bonds and on deterministic fractal substrates. We propose a unifying interpretation of the phase-ordering processes based on two classes of…
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…
Systems containing active components are intrinsically out of equilibrium, while binary mixtures reach their equilibrium configuration when complete phase separation is achieved. Active particles are found to stabilise non-equilibrium…