New preprint on multicomponent liquids

Schematic of a fluid of four different components separating into phases.

Biological cells need to orchestrate thousands of different biomolecules for reliable function. To do this, they partly rely on phase separation as a passive physical mechanism to form membrane-less compartments of distinct composition. We study how molecular interactions determine phase behavior by introducing a novel numerical method for multicomponent liquids. We find that random and structured interaction patterns typically do not lead to a precise number of phases. In contrast, evolutionarily optimized interactions can solve this task perfectly and are robust to internal and external perturbations. We thus demonstrate that adjusting microscopic interactions leads to stable emergent behaviors in these complex systems.

This work, which we performed with Liedewij Laan from TU Delft, is now available as a preprint on arXiv.