Multiple papers published

We published multiple papers in the first half of 2024!

Chengjie Luo and Yicheng Qiang published a paper in Phys. Rev. Res. showing how higher order interactions affect multicomponent phase separation. This topic is particularly relevant for phase separation in cells since the involved biomolecules are many and possess complex interactions which cannot be captured by the simple Flory-Huggins free energy. Indeed, we find that higher-order interactions can strongly modify the phase diagram and might thus play an important role in the formation of condensates.

Noah Ziethen published a follow-up on our story on the nucleation of active droplets. In the new paper, published in JCP, we study the interaction of active droplets with walls. On the one hand, walls disturb the diffusive fluxes created by the reactions, leading to pancake-shaped droplets. On the other hand, wall affinity can accelerate nucleation, akin to passive heterogeneous nucleation. At the same time, activity suppresses nucleation, opening up many regulatory pathways for controlling sessile droplets in these active systems.

Our collaboration with Nate Goering from the Crick Institute led to its first publication in the EMBO Journal. In this publication, we show how dimerization and membrane binding enhance each other, leading to a nonlinear increase in effective membrane affinity. This behavior could explain how cells control how protein patterns form on membranes.

We also previously reported on our non-local elasticity theory, which explains how phase separation forms regular patterns in elastic gels. This paper has now been published in PRX!