Related papers: Roadmap for Condensates in Cell Biology
Biomolecular condensates play a central role in the spatial organization of living matter. Their formation is now well understood as a form of liquid-liquid phase separation that occurs very far from equilibrium. For instance, they can be…
Membrane tubulation is a ubiquitous process that occurs both at the plasma membrane and on the membranes of intracellular organelles. These tubulation events are known to be mediated by forces applied on the membrane either due to motor…
Model biomembrane systems play a crucial role in advancing biomedical research by providing simplified yet effective platforms for exploring complex biological mechanisms. These systems span a wide range of scales, from…
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…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
Liquid mixtures of many interacting components often exhibit numerous coexisting types of droplets. An exciting example is the cytosol of biological cells, where diverse droplets, called condensates, are essential for cellular function.…
Cells operate in part by compartmentalizing chemical reactions. For example, recent work has shown that chromatin, the material that contains the cell's genome, can auto-regulate its structure by utilizing reaction products (proteins, RNA)…
The biomolecules in and around a living cell -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates -- continuously sample myriad conformational states that are thermally accessible at physiological temperatures. Simultaneously, a given…
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a…
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps 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…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
Living systems must maintain robust biochemical function despite fluctuations that span a wide range of timescales. Biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) have been shown to buffer concentration…
Cells contain elaborate and interconnected networks of protein polymers which make up the cytoskeleton. The cytoskeleton governs the internal positioning and movement of vesicles and organelles, and controls dynamic changes in cell…
It has long been hypothesized that futile cycles in cellular metabolism are involved in the regulation of biochemical pathways. Following the work of Newsholme and Crabtree, we develop a quantitative theory for this idea based on…
Phase separation of various materials has been studied for one and a half centuries. In the last two decades, phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids has received enormous attention, due its relevance to cellular functions. However,…
Proteins control many vital functions in living cells, such as cell growth and cell division. Reliable coordination of these functions requires the spatial and temporal organizaton of proteins inside cells, which encodes information about…
Biological cells, by definition, are the basic units which contain the fundamental molecules of life of which all living things are composed. Understanding how they function and differentiating cells from one another therefore is of…