Related papers: A generic model for lipid monolayers, bilayers, an…
We analyze the structural behavior of a single polymer chain grafted to an attractive, flexible surface. Our model is composed of a coarse-grained bead-and-spring polymer and a tethered membrane. By means of extensive parallel tempering…
A simple, dual-site model of bolaamphiphiles (bolaforms or bipolar amphiphiles) is developed based on an earlier single-site model of (monopolar) amphiphiles [S. Dey, J. Saha, Phys. Rev. E 95, 023315 (2017)]. The model incorporates aqueous…
By Monte Carlo simulations of a soft ellipsoid model for liquid crystals, we study whether a layer of grafted liquid-crystalline chain molecules can induce tilt in a nematic fluid. The chains are fairly short (four monomers) and made of the…
Multi-component membranes such as ternary mixtures of lipids and cholesterol can exhibit coexistence regions between two liquid phases. When such membranes adhere to a corrugated substrate, the phase separation process strongly depends on…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
The structure of the ripple phase of phospholipid membranes remains poorly understood in spite of a large number of theoretical studies, with many experimentally established structural features of this phase unaccounted for. In this article…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
In an effort to understand ``rafts'' in biological membranes, we propose phenomenological models for saturated and unsaturated lipid mixtures, and lipid-cholesterol mixtures. We consider simple couplings between the local composition and…
Motivated by the experimental study of Tayebi et al. [Nature Mater. 11, 1074 (2012)] on phase separation of stacked multi-component lipid bilayers, we propose a model composed of stacked two-dimensional Ising spins. We study both its static…
Multicomponent bilayer structures arise as the ubiquitous plasma membrane in cellular biology and as blends of amphiphilic copolymers used in electrolyte membranes, drug delivery, and emulsion stabilization within the context of synthetic…
The prediction of the equation of state and the phase behavior of simple fluids (noble gases, carbon dioxide, benzene, methane, short alkane chains) and their mixtures by Monte Carlo computer simulation and analytic approximations based on…
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…
Certain membrane proteins, peptides, nanoparticles and nanotubes have rigid structure and fixed shape. They are often viewed as spheres and cylinders with certain surface properties. Single Chain Mean Field theory is used to model the…
Piecewise smooth hybrid systems, involving continuous and discrete variables, are suitable models for describing the multiscale regulatory machinery of the biological cells. In hybrid models, the discrete variables can switch on and off…
Diffusion in cell membranes is not just simple two-dimensional Brownian motion, but typically depends on the timescale of the observation. The physical origins of this anomalous sub-diffusion are unresolved, and model systems capable of…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
We discuss the reliability of integral-equation methods based on several commonly used closure relations in determining the phase diagram of coarse-grained models of soft-matter systems characterized by mutually interacting soft and…
Changes in the geometry and topology of self-assembled membranes underlie diverse processes across cellular biology and engineering. Similar to lipid bilayers, monolayer colloidal membranes have in-plane fluid-like dynamics and out-of-plane…
We investigate the slow dynamics in gelling systems by means of MonteCarlo simulations on the cubic lattice of a minimal statistical mechanics model. By opportunely varying some model parameter we are able to describe a crossover from the…
The structural phase behavior of polymer brushes, single-component linear homopolymers grafted onto a planar substrate, is studied using the molecular Monte Carlo method in 3 dimensions. When simulation parameters of the system are set in…