相关论文: Phase separation on surfaces in presence of matter…
Biological membranes often exhibit heterogeneous protein patterns, which cells control. Strong patterns, like the polarity spot in budding yeast, can be described as surface condensates, formed by physical interactions between constituents.…
Cellular membranes are a heterogeneous mix of lipids, proteins and small molecules. Special groupings of saturated lipids and cholesterol form a liquid-ordered phase, known as `lipid rafts,' serving as platforms for signaling, trafficking…
Motivated by observations of heterogeneous domain structure on the surface of cells, we consider a minimal model to describe the dynamics of phase separation on the surface of a spherical particle. Finite-size effects on the curved particle…
Liposomes that achieve a heterogeneous and spatially organized surface through phase separation have been recognized to be a promising platform for delivery purposes. However, their design and optimization through experimentation can be…
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…
We consider a mixture of one neutral and two oppositely charged types of molecules confined to a surface. Using analytical techniques and molecular dynamics simulations, we construct the phase diagram of the system and exhibit the…
Phase separation and coarsening is a phenomenon commonly seen in binary physical and chemical systems that occur in nature. Often times, thermal fluctuations, modeled as stochastic noise, are present in the system and the phase segregation…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Understanding the (de)mixing behavior of multicomponent lipid bilayers is an important step towards unraveling the nature of spatial composition heterogeneities in cellular membranes and their role in biological function. We use…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…
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…
A driven system of three species of particle diffusing on a ring is studied in detail. The dynamics is local and conserves the three densities. A simple argument suggesting that the model should phase separate and break the translational…
Membrane phase-separation is a mechanism that biological membranes often use to locally concentrate specific lipid species in order to organize diverse membrane processes. Phase separation has also been explored as a tool for the design of…
Experiments on supported lipid bilayers featuring liquid ordered/disordered domains have shown that the spatial arrangement of the lipid domains and their chemical composition are strongly affected by the curvature of the substrate.…
In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we…
Phase separation in complex systems is a ubiquitous phenomenon. While simple theories predict coarsening until only macroscopically large phases remain, concrete models often exhibit patterns with finite length scales. To unify such models,…
Direct comparison is made of the steady-sates and coarsening dynamics in a local system and its nonlocal generalization. The example system is the surface of a solid film in a strong electric field; the morphological evolution of the…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
In experiments on model membranes, a formation of large domains of different lipid composition is readily observed. However, no such phase separation is observed in the membranes of intact cells. Instead, a structure of small transient…
Conservative and non-conservative phase-field models are considered for the numerical simulation of lateral phase separation and coarsening in biological membranes. An unfitted finite element method is devised for these models to allow for…