Related papers: Enzyme-driven phase separation
Dynamic facilitation theory assumes short-ranged dynamic constraints to be the essential feature of supercooled liquids and draws much of its conclusions from the study of kinetically constrained models. While deceptively simple, these…
Spatial organization of proteins in cells is important for many biological functions. In general, the nonlinear, spatially coupled models for protein-pattern formation are only accessible to numerical simulations, which has limited insight…
DNA methylation is a primary layer of epigenetic modification that plays a pivotal role in the regulation of development, aging, and cancer. The concurrent activity of opposing enzymes that mediate DNA methylation and demethylation gives…
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…
Microphase separation is common in active biological systems as exemplified by the separation of RNA and DNA-rich phases in the cell nucleus driven by the transcriptional activity of polymerase enzymes acting similarly to amphiphiles in a…
A continuum model for the phase separation and coarsening, observed in electrostatically driven granular media, is formulated in terms of a Ginzburg-Landau equation subject to conservation of the total number of grains. In the regime of…
A general framework to describe a vast majority of biology-inspired systems is to model them as stochastic processes in which multiple couplings are in play at the same time. Molecular motors, chemical reaction networks, catalytic enzymes,…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
We present extensive numerical simulations of the Axelrod's model for social influence, aimed at understanding the formation of cultural domains. This is a nonequilibrium model with short range interactions and a remarkably rich dynamical…
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,…
A rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing the chemical master equation (CME) with bistability, based on the theory of large deviation, is proposed. Using a simple phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycle with feedback as an example, we…
We present a theoretical study of a system with competing short-range ferromagnetic attraction and a long-range anti-ferromagnetic repulsion, in the presence of a uniform external magnetic field. The interplay between these interactions, at…
Phase separation of multicomponent lipid membranes is characterized by the nucleation and coarsening of circular membrane domains that grow slowly in time as $\sim t^{1/3}$, following classical theories of coalescence and Ostwald ripening.…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is the mechanism underlying the formation of biomolecular condensates. Disordered protein regions often drive phase separation, but molecular interactions of disordered protein regions are not well understood,…
Whereas entropy can induce phase behavior that is as rich as seen in energetic systems, microphase separation remains a very rare phenomenon in entropic systems. In this paper, we present a density functional approach to study the…
Active particles, including swimming microorganisms, autophoretic colloids and droplets, are known to self-organize into ordered structures at fluid-solid boundaries. The entrainment of particles in the attractive parts of their spontaneous…
A novel two-leaflet description of lipid membranes is proposed. Within its framework, phase separation phenomena in multicomponent biological membranes are analyzed. As we show, interactions between the leaflets tend to suppress macroscopic…
We study the problem of phase separation in systems with a positive definite order parameter, and in particular, in systems with absorbing states. Owing to the presence of a single minimum in the free energy driving the relaxation kinetics,…
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…
We present a thermodynamically consistent model describing the dynamics of a multi-component mixture where one enzyme component catalyzes a reaction between other components. We find that the catalytic activity alone can induce phase…