Related papers: The riddle of the plant vacuolar sorting receptors
Eukaryotic cells maintain their inner order by a hectic process of distillation of molecular factors taking place on the surface of their lipid membranes. To understand the properties of this molecular sorting process, a physical model of…
We introduce a simple physical picture to explain the process of molecular sorting, whereby specific proteins are concentrated and distilled into submicrometric lipid vesicles in eukaryotic cells. To this purpose, we formulate a model based…
The proper sorting of membrane components by regulated exchange between cellular organelles is crucial to intra-cellular organisation. This process relies on the budding and fusion of transport vesicles, and should be strongly influenced by…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
The production processes of proteins in prokaryotic cells are investigated. Most of the mathematical models in the literature study the production of {\em one} fixed type of proteins. When several classes of proteins are considered, an…
Molecular sorting is a fundamental process that allows eukaryotic cells to distill and concentrate specific chemical factors in appropriate cell membrane subregions, thus endowing them with different chemical identities and functional…
Proteins in photosynthetic membranes can organize into patterned arrays that span the membrane's lateral size. Attractions between proteins in different layers of a membrane stack can play a key role in this ordering, as was suggested by…
A chloroplast is a subcellular organelle of photosynthesis in plant and algal cells. A chloroplast genome encodes proteins of the photosynthetic electron transport chain and ribosomal proteins required to express them. Chloroplast-encoded…
We theoretically predict and experimentally demonstrate that several different particle species can be separated from each other by means of a ratchet device, consisting of periodically arranged triangular (ratchet) shaped obstacles. We…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
Compartmentalization into biochemically distinct organelles constantly exchanging material is one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic cells. In the most naive picture of inter-organelle transport driven by concentration gradients, concentration…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…
Proteins are biological polymers that underlie all cellular functions. The first high-resolution protein structures were determined by x-ray crystallography in the 1960s. Since then, there has been continued interest in understanding and…
Understanding the pathways by which viral capsid proteins assemble around their genomes could identify key intermediates as potential drug targets. In this work we use computer simulations to characterize assembly over a wide range of…
One of the many ways cells transmit information within their volume is through steady spatial gradients of different proteins. However, the mechanism through which proteins without any sources or sinks form such single-cell gradients is not…
Cell wall proteins are essential constituents of plant cell walls; they are involved in modifications of cell wall components, wall structure, signaling and interactions with plasma membrane proteins at the cell surface. The application of…
Filtration of feed containing multiple species of particles is a common process in the industrial setting. In this work we propose a model for filtration of a suspension containing an arbitrary number of particle species, each with…
The secretion of vesicles for intracellular transport often rely on the aggregation of specialized membrane-bound proteins into a coat able to curve cell membranes. The nucleation and growth of a protein coat is a kinetic process that…
The ultimate goal of proteomic analysis of a cell compartment should be the exhaustive identification of resident proteins; excluding proteins from other cell compartments. Plant cell walls possess specific difficulties. Several reported…