Related papers: Enzyme-driven phase separation
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Non-equilibrium selection pressures were proposed for the formation of oligonucleotides with rich functionalities encoded in their sequences, such as catalysis. Since phase separation was shown to direct various chemical processes, we ask…
Recent studies have shown that one-dimensional driven systems can exhibit phase separation even if the dynamics is governed by local rules. The ABC model, which comprises three particle species that diffuse asymmetrically around a ring,…
Replication and transcription are two important processes in living systems. To execute such processes, various proteins work far away from equilibrium in a staggered way. Motivated by this, aspects of hysteresis during unzipping of DNA…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
Several different kinds of criteria for non-equilibrium phase separation to discriminate the two stages, the spinnodal decompostion (SD) and domain growth (DG), are compared and further investigated. The characteristic domain size and…
Cell polarization underlies many cellular processes, such as differentiation, migration, and budding. Many living cells, such as budding yeast and fission yeast, use cytoskeletal structures to actively transport proteins to one location on…
Motility and nonreciprocity are two primary mechanisms for self-organization in active matter. In a recent study [Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 148301 (2023)], we explored their joint influence in a minimal model of two-species quorum-sensing…
A self-consistent stochastic model of domain structure formation in a uniaxial ferroelectric, quenched from a high-temperature paraelectric phase to a low-temperature ferroelectric phase, is developed with an account of the applied electric…
Experiments show that the movement of eukaryotic cells is regulated by a process of phase separation of two competing enzymes on the cell membrane, that effectively amplifies shallow external gradients of chemical attractant. Notably, the…
The interaction of phase-separating systems with chemical reactions is of great interest in various contexts, from biology to material science. In biology, phase separation is thought to be the driving force behind the formation of…
We present a study of a phase-separation process induced by the presence of spatially-correlated multiplicative noise. We develop a mean-field approach suitable for conserved-order-parameter systems and use it to obtain the phase diagram of…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
Phase separation is the thermodynamic process that explains how droplets form in multicomponent fluids. These droplets can provide controlled compartments to localize chemical reactions, and reactions can also affect the droplets' dynamics.…
Elastic MicroPhase Separation (EMPS) provides a simple route to create soft materials with homogeneous microstructures by leveraging the supersaturation of crosslinked polymer networks with liquids. At low supersaturation, network…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
The dynamics of cellular pattern formation is crucial for understanding embryonic development and tissue morphogenesis. Recent studies have shown that human dermal fibroblasts cultured on liquid crystal elastomers can exhibit an increase in…
By analytically solving some simple models of phase-ordering kinetics, we suggest a mechanism for the onset of non-equilibrium behaviour in colloid-polymer mixtures. These mixtures can function as models of atomic systems; their physics…
We use a continuum model to examine the effect of activity on a phase separating mixture of an extensile active nematic and a passive fluid. We highlight the distinct role of previously considered interfacial active stresses and bulk active…