Related papers: Fluid-membrane tethers: minimal surfaces and elast…

We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…

The tensile force along a cylindrical lipid bilayer tube is proportional to the membrane's bending modulus and inversely proportional to the tube radius. We show that this relation, which is experimentally exploited to measure bending…

Biomembranes, primarily composed of lipid bilayers, are not merely passive barriers but dynamic and complex materials whose shapes are governed by the principles of soft matter physics. This review explores the shape problem in biomembranes…

Within the framework of the well-known curvature models, a fluid lipid bilayer membrane is regarded as a surface embedded in the three-dimensional Euclidean space whose equilibrium shapes are described in terms of its mean and Gaussian…

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 consider an adhesive contact between a thin soft layer on a rigid substrate and a rigid cylindrical indenter ("line contact") with account of the surface tension of the layer. First, it is shown that the boundary condition for the…

When a ligand that is bound to an integral membrane receptor is pulled, the membrane and the underlying cytoskeleton can deform before either the membrane delaminates from the cytoskeleton or the ligand detaches from the receptor. If the…

The buckling of elastic bodies is a common phenomenon in the mechanics of solids. Wrinkling of membranes can often be interpreted as buckling under constraints that prohibit large amplitude deformation. We present a combination of analytic…

We set up the statistical mechanics for a nearly flat, thermally equilibrated fluid membrane, attached to an elastic network through one of its sides. We predict that the resulting structural (inversion) asymmetry of the membrane, notably…

Thin cylindrical membranes arise in a wide variety of biological systems ranging from tubular structures on and within cell membranes to in-vitro experiments on artificial vesicles. Motor proteins embedded in such fluidic membranes often…

Recent experiments have shown that when a near-hemispherical lipid vesicle attached to a solid surface is subjected to a simple shear flow it exhibits a pattern of membrane circulation much like a dipole vortex. This is in marked contrast…

We use theory and numerical computation to determine the shape of an axisymmetric fluid membrane with a resistance to bending and constant area. The membrane connects two rings in the classic geometry that produces a catenoidal shape in a…

We investigate the steady states and dynamical instabilities resulting from ``particles'' depositing on (fusion) and pinching off (fission) a fluid membrane. These particles could be either small lipid vesicles or isolated proteins. In the…

When a surfactant-stabilised oil droplet with an ultralow interfacial tension is trapped in the focus of two laser beams and pulled apart (by moving the laser beams) a configuration of two droplets connected by a thin tether of oil results.…

Investigations of free-standing liquid films enjoy an increasing popularity due to their relevance for many fundamental and applied scientific problems. They constitute soap bubbles and foams, serve as membranes for gas transport or as…

We present a simple coarse-grained bead-and-spring model for lipid bilayers. The system has been developed to reproduce the main (gel-liquid) transition of biological membranes on intermediate length scales of a couple of nanometres and is…

We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of the buckling of a thin film wrapped around a sphere under the action of capillary forces. A rigid sphere is coated with a wetting liquid, and then wrapped by a thin film into an…

A theoretical study of vesicles of topological genus zero is presented. The bilayer membranes forming the vesicles have various degrees of intrinsic (tangent-plane) orientational order, ranging from smectic to hexatic, frustrated by…

Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…

We introduce and study the behavior of a tethered membrane of non-zero thickness embedded in three dimensions subject to an effective self-attraction induced by hydrophobicity arising from the tendency to minimize the area exposed to a…