Related papers: Enzyme-driven phase separation
Enzymes are nano-scale machines that have evolved to drive chemical reactions out of equilibrium in the right place at the right time. Given the complexity and specificity of enzymatic function, bottom-up design of enzymes presents a…
Phase-field simulation (PFS) have revolutionized the understanding of domain structure and switching behavior in ferroelectric thin films and ceramics. Generally, PFS is based on solution of a (set) of Ginzburg-Landau equations for a…
Membrane phase-separation is a mechanism that biological membranes often use to locally concentrate specific lipid species in order to organize diverse membrane processes. Phase separation has also been explored as a tool for the design of…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is now recognized as a common mechanism for regulating enzyme activity in cells. Insights from studies in cells are complemented by in vitro studies aimed at developing better understanding of mechanisms…
Multicomponent phase separation is a routine occurrence in both living and synthetic systems. Thermodynamics provides a straightforward path to determine the phase boundaries that characterize these transitions for systems at equilibrium.…
Motivated by recent experimental and theoretical work on the control of phase separation by (electro-)autocatalytic reactions, we analyze pattern formation in externally driven phase separating systems described by a generalization of the…
Liquid-liquid phase separation plays a major role in the formation and maintenance of various membrane-less subcellular structures in the cytoplasm and nucleus of cells. Biological condensates contain enhanced concentrations of proteins and…
Signaling molecules play an important role for many cellular functions. We investigate here a general system of two membrane reaction-diffusion equations coupled to a diffusion equation inside the cell by a Robin-type boundary condition and…
Elastic microphase separation refers to equilibrium patterns that form by phase separation in elastic gels. Recent experiments revealed a continuous phase transition from the homogeneous phase to a regularly patterned phase, whose period…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
Based on a recently proposed non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation [cond-mat/0312366] we study how morphogenesis can be controlled by locally coupled discrete dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of…
We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a many-body bosonic system on a lattice, subject to driving and dissipation. The time-evolution is described by a master equation, which we treat within a generalized Gutzwiller mean field…
Phase separation dynamics with an initially non-uniform concentration are studied. Critical and off-critical behavior is observed simultaneously. A mechanism for an expanding phase separated region is demonstrated and the time dependence of…
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…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs in various equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems, where phase transitions are typically marked by a single critical point that separates ordered and disordered regimes. We reveal a novel phenomenon in…
The influence of external fluctuations in phase separation processes is analysed. These fluctuations arise from random variations of an external control parameter. A linear stability analysis of the homogeneous state shows that phase…
We consider a phenomenological continuum model for an active nematic fluid and show a universal, model independent, instability which renders the homogeneous nematic state unstable to order fluctuations. Using numerical and analytic tools…
Important cellular processes, such as cell motility and cell division, are coordinated by cell polarity, which is determined by the non-uniform distribution of certain proteins. Such protein patterns form via an interplay of protein…
We propose a novel phase-field model to predict elastic microphase separation in polymer gels. To this end, we extend the Cahn-Hilliard free-energy functional to incorporate an elastic strain energy and a coupling term. These contributions…