相关论文: Controlling cargo trafficking in multicomponent me…

Colloids and proteins alike can bind to lipid bilayers and move laterally in these two-dimensional fluids. Inspired by proteins that generate membrane curvature, sense the underlying membrane geometry, and migrate to high curvature sites,…

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…

Cells frequently employ extracellular vesicles, or exosomes, to signal across long distances and coordinate collective actions. Exosomes diffuse slowly, can be actively degraded, and contain stochastic amounts of molecular cargo. These…

Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…

We discuss a theoretical model for bidirectional cargo transport in biological cells, which is driven by teams of molecular motors and subject to thermal fluctuations. The model describes explicitly the directed motion of the molecular…

Cargo distribution within eukaryotic cells relies on the active transport mechanisms driven by molecular motors. Despite their critical role, the intricate relationship between motor transport properties and cargo binding - and its impact…

The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…

Self-assembly of simple molecules into complex phases can be driven by physical constraints, for instance, due to selective molecular uptake by nanoporous surfaces. Despite the significance of surface-mediated assembly in evolution of life,…

Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…

Modulating ion transport through nanoporous membranes is critical to many important chemical and biological separation processes. The corresponding transport timescales, however, are often too long to capture accurately using conventional…

Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…

Living systems are chiral on multiple scales, from constituent biopolymers to large scale morphology, and their active mechanics is both driven by chiral components and serves to generate chiral morphologies. We describe the mechanics of…

Efficient and non-invasive techniques of cargo delivery to biological cells are the focus of biomedical research because of their great potential importance for targeted drug therapy. Therefore, much effort is being made to study the…

Molecular transport maintains cellular structures and functions. For example, lipid and protein diffusion sculpts the dynamic shapes and structures on the cell membrane that perform essential cellular functions, such as cell signaling.…

Phagocytosis is the process of engulfment and internalization of comparatively large particles by the cell, that plays a central role in the functioning of our immune system. We study the process of phagocytosis by considering a simplified…

The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…

Most models designed to study the bidirectional movement of cargos as they are driven by molecular motors rely on the idea that motors of different polarities can be coordinated by external agents if arranged into a motor-cargo complex to…

Within living cells, the transport of cargo is accomplished by groups of molecular motors. Such collective transport could utilize mechanisms which emerge from inter-motor interactions in ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here we…

Membrane transporters contribute to the regulation of the internal environment of cells by translocating substrates across cell membranes. Like all physical systems, the behaviour of membrane transporters is constrained by the laws of…

Many of the processes that underly neural computation are carried out by ion channels embedded in the plasma membrane, a two-dimensional liquid that surrounds all cells. Recent experiments have demonstrated that this membrane is poised…