Related papers: Cluster phases of membrane proteins
Many essential cellular processes, including cell division and the establishment of cell polarity during embryogenesis, are regulated by pattern-forming proteins. These proteins often need to bind to a substrate, such as the cell membrane,…
The observation of Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation (LLPS) in biological cells has dramatically shifted the paradigm that soluble proteins are uniformly dispersed in the cytoplasm or nucleoplasm. The LLPS region is preceded by a one-phase…
The interplay of membrane proteins is vital for many biological processes, such as cellular transport, cell division, and signal transduction between nerve cells. Theoretical considerations have led to the idea that the membrane itself…
A simple three-dimensional model of a fluid whose constituent particles interact via a short range attractive and long range repulsive potential is used to model the aggregation into large spherical-like clusters made up of hundreds of…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
We study analytically the structural properties of a system with a short-range attraction and a competing long-range screened repulsion. This model contains the essential features of the effective interaction potential among charged…
Cell membranes are anchored to the cytoskeleton via immobile inclusions. We investigate the effect of such anchors on the in-plane dynamics of a fluid membrane and mobile inclusions (proteins) embedded in it. The immobile particles lead to…
We study a two-dimensional model for interacting colloidal particles which displays spontaneous clustering. Within this model we investigate the competition between the pinning to a periodic corrugation potential, and a sideways constant…
We analyze the stability of micro-domains of ligand-receptor bonds that mediate the adhesion of biological model membranes. After evaluating the effects of membrane fluctuations on the binding affinity of a single bond, we characterize the…
In simple colloidal suspensions, clusters are various multimers that result from colloid self-association and exist in equilibrium with monomers.There are two types of potentials that are known to produce clusters: a) potentials that result…
We model the spatiotemporal dynamics of cellular protein concentrations near membranes composed of different lipids using a three-variable continuum model for membrane-bound protein, cytosolic protein, and the local composition of a binary…
Fluids with competing short-range attractions and long-range repulsions mimic dispersions of charge-stabilized colloids that can display equilibrium structures with intermediate range order (IRO), including particle clusters. Using…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
A scaling theory is developed for diffusion-limited cluster aggregation in a porous medium, where the primary particles and clusters stick irreversibly to the walls of the pore space as well as to each other. Three scaling regimes are…
By performing molecular dynamics simulations with up to 132 million coarse-grained particles in half-micron sized boxes, we show that hydrodynamics quantitatively explains the finite-size effects on diffusion of lipids, proteins, and carbon…
In many cellular signaling pathways, key components form clusters at the cell membrane. Although much work has focused on the mechanisms behind such cluster formation, the implications for downstream signaling remain poorly understood.…
Formation of organs and specialized tissues in embryonic development requires migration of cells to specific targets. In some instances, such cells migrate as a robust cluster. We here explore a recent local approximation of nonlocal…
The principles underlying protein folding remains one of Nature's puzzles with important practical consequences for Life. An approach that has gathered momentum since the late 1990's, looks at protein hetero-polymers and their folding…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
We investigate the formation of cluster crystals with multiply occupied lattice sites on a spherical surface in systems of ultra-soft particles interacting via repulsive, bounded pair potentials. Not all interactions of this kind lead to…