Related papers: Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation in a Minimal Explic…
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,…
The physics and morphology of biomolecular condensates formed through liquid-liquid phase separation underpin diverse biological processes, exemplified by the nested organization of nucleoli that facilitates ribosome biogenesis. Here, we…
Using numerical simulations, we examine a simple model of two or more coupled one-dimensional channels of driven particles with repulsive interactions in the presence of quenched disorder. We find that this model exhibits a remarkably rich…
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…
The spatial organization of complex biochemical reactions is essential for the regulation of cellular processes. Membrane-less structures called foci containing high concentrations of specific proteins have been reported in a variety of…
Biomolecular condensates provide distinct chemical environments, which control various cellular processes. The diffusive dynamics and chemical kinetics inside phase-separated condensates can be studied experimentally by fluorescently…
Motivated by the observations of intracellular phase separations and the wetting of cell membranes by protein droplets, we study the nonequilibrium surface wetting by Monte Carlo simulations of a lattice gas model involving particle…
The phase behavior of charged rods in the presence of inter-rod linkers is studied theoretically as a model for the equilibrium behavior underlying the organization of actin filaments by linker proteins in the cytoskeleton. The presence of…
Coarse-grained (CG) molecular dynamics simulations enable efficient exploration of protein conformational ensembles. However, reconstructing atomic details from CG structures (backmapping) remains a challenging problem. Current approaches…
We show here a general model of phase separation in isotropic condensed matter, namely, a viscoelastic model. We propose that the bulk mechanical relaxation modulus that has so far been ignored in previous theories plays an important role…
The rapid adhesion of motile bacteria from dilute suspensions poses a fundamental non-equilibrium problem: hydrodynamic interactions bias bacterial motion near surfaces without generating stable confinement, while electrostatic interactions…
We study analytically the dynamics and the micro-structural changes of a host medium caused by a driven tracer particle moving in a confined, quiescent molecular crowding environment. Imitating typical settings of active micro-rheology…
Multicomponent systems are ubiquitous in nature and industry. While the physics of few-component liquid mixtures (i.e., binary and ternary ones) is well-understood and routinely taught in undergraduate courses, the thermodynamic and kinetic…
Biomolecular phase separation is typically attributed to the polymer physics of long, disordered chains. However, the underlying chemical grammar, i.e. the specific interactions between protein and RNA building blocks, remains poorly…
A physical scenario accounting for the existence of size-limited submicrometric domains in cell membranes is proposed. It is based on the numerical investigation of the counterpart, in lipidic membranes where proteins are diffusing, of the…
The function of biomolecules such as proteins depends on their ability to interconvert between a wide range of structures or "conformations." Researchers have endeavored for decades to develop computational methods to predict the…
The capacity of proteins to interact specifically with one another underlies our conceptual understanding of how living systems function. Systems-level study of specificity in protein-protein interactions is complicated by the fact that the…
To study the interplay of jamming, cluster formation, and motility-induced phase separation in the zero temperature limit in two dimensions, we consider a simple model system consisting of a bidisperse mixture of disks that are only subject…
Physical mechanisms of phase separation in living systems can play key physiological roles and have recently been the focus of intensive studies. The strongly heterogeneous and disordered nature of such phenomena in the biological domain…
We propose a model describing the phase behavior of two-component membranes consisting of binary mixtures of electrically charged and neutral lipids. We take into account the structural phase transition (main-transition) of the hydrocarbon…