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We study the stress distribution profiles and the height and thickness fluctuations of lipid membranes in the tilted gel state by Monte Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid membranes, which reproduces many known…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
In biology, cells undergo deformations under the action of flow caused by the fluid surrounding them. These flows lead to shape changes and instabilities that have been explored in detail for single component vesicles. However, cell…
We devise a soft, solvent-free, coarse-grained model for lipid bilayer membranes. The non-bonded interactions take the form of a weighted-density functional which allows us to describe the thermodynamics of self-assembly and packing effects…
We outline a concept of self-assembled soft matter devices based on micro-fluidics, which use surfactant bilayer membranes as their main building blocks, arrested in geometric structures provided by top-down lithography. Membranes form…
We propose a mechanism for mechanical regulation at the membrane of living cells, based on the exchange of membrane area between the cell membrane and a membrane reservoir. The reservoir is composed of invaginated membrane microdomains…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
We consider the role of nonlamellar-forming lipids in biological membranes by examining fluctuations, within the random phase approximation, of a model mixture of two lipids, one of which forms lamellar phases while the other forms inverted…
Many biological and synthetic materials self-assemble into helical or twisted aggregates. The shape is determined by a complex interplay between elastic forces and the orientation and chirality of the constituent molecules. We study this…
The red blood cell (RBC) membrane is composed of a lipid bilayer and a cytoskeleton interconnected by protein junction complexes, allowing for potential sliding between the lipid bilayer and the cytoskeleton. Despite this biological…
Several biological tissues undergo changes in their geometry and in their bulk material properties by modelling and remodelling processes. Modelling synthesises tissue in some regions and removes tissue in others. Remodelling overwrites old…
Thin cylindrical tethers are common lipid bilayer membrane structures, arising in situations ranging from micromanipulation experiments on artificial vesicles to the dynamic structure of the Golgi apparatus. We study the shape and formation…
Lipid bilayers composed of non-alpha hydroxy sphingosine ceramide (CER NS), cholesterol (CHOL), and free fatty acids (FFA), which are components of the human skin barrier, are studied via molecular dynamics simulations. Since mixtures of…
The intricate three-dimensional geometries of protein tertiary structures underlie protein function and emerge through a folding process from one-dimensional chains of amino acids. The exact spatial sequence and configuration of amino…
The shell map is a very simple representation of the structure of foams, combining the geometrical (random tiling) and dynamical (loss of information from an arbitrary cell out) aspects of disorder. The structure is built from the central…
Colloidal membranes, self assembled monolayers of aligned rod like molecules, offer a template for designing membranes with definite shapes and curvature, and possibly new functionalities in the future. Often the constituent rods, due to…
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…
The surface curvature of membranes, interfaces, and substrates plays a crucial role in shaping the self-assembly of particles adsorbed on these surfaces. However, little is known about the interplay between particle anisotropy and surface…
Statistical ensembles of flexible two-dimensional fluid membranes arise naturally in the description of many physical systems. Typically one encounters such systems in a regime of low tension but high stiffness against bending, which is…
Self-assembly dynamics in binary surfactant mixtures and structure changes of lipid vesicles induced by detergent solution are studied using coarse-grained molecular simulations. Disk-shaped micelles, the bicelles, are stabilized by…