Related papers: Enzyme-driven phase separation
Biomembranes, which are mainly composed of neutral and charged lipids, exhibit a large variety of functional structures and dynamics. Here, we report a coarse-grained molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of the phase separation and…
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…
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…
Phase separating systems that are maintained away from thermodynamic equilibrium via molecular processes represent a class of active systems, which we call active emulsions. These systems are driven by external energy input for example…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
In experiments on model membranes, a formation of large domains of different lipid composition is readily observed. However, no such phase separation is observed in the membranes of intact cells. Instead, a structure of small transient…
Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases…
Understanding the spatial organisation of the genome in the cell nucleus is one of the current grand challenges in biophysics. Certain biochemical -- or epigenetic -- marks that are deposited along the genome are thought to play an…
Heterogeneities in the cell membrane due to coexisting lipid phases have been conjectured to play a major functional role in cell signaling and membrane trafficking. Thereby the material properties of multiphase systems, such as the line…
Cellular differentiation is governed by gene regulatory networks, the high-dimensional stochastic biochemical systems that determine the transcriptional landscape and mediate cellular responses to signals and perturbations. Although…
A non-isothermal phase field model that captures both displacive and diffusive phase transformations in a unified framework is presented. The model is developed in a formal thermodynamic setting, which provides guidance on admissible…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
Conservative and non-conservative phase-field models are considered for the numerical simulation of lateral phase separation and coarsening in biological membranes. An unfitted finite element method is devised for these models to allow for…
Cell polarization plays a central role in the development of complex organisms. It has been recently shown that cell polarization may follow from the proximity to a phase separation instability in a bistable network of chemical reactions.…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
In this paper, we bring together our efforts in identifying and understanding nonequilibrium phase segregation driven by active processes in the living cell, with special focus on the segregation of cell membrane components driven by active…
Intracellular protein patterns regulate a variety of vital cellular processes such as cell division and motility, which often involve dynamic changes of cell shape. These changes in cell shape may in turn affect the dynamics of…
Liposomes that achieve a heterogeneous and spatially organized surface through phase separation have been recognized to be a promising platform for delivery purposes. However, their design and optimization through experimentation can be…
The effect of quenched disorder in the one-dimensional asymmetric exclusion process is reviewed. Both particlewise and sitewise disorder generically induces phase separation in a range of densities. In the particlewise case the existence of…
We study the coarsening of strongly microphase separated membrane domains in the presence of recycling of material. We study the dynamics of the domain size distribution under both scale-free and size-dependent recycling. Closed form…