Supramolecular Fuzziness of Intracellular Liquid Droplets: Liquid–Liquid Phase Transitions, Membrane-Less Organelles, and Intrinsic Disorder

Phase transitions and size scaling of membrane-less organelles

The coordinated growth of cells and their organelles is a fundamental and poorly understood problem, with implications for processes ranging from embryonic development to oncogenesis. Recent experiments have shed light on the cell size-dependent assembly of membrane-less cytoplasmic and nucleoplasmic structures, including ribonucleoprotein (RNP) granules and other intracellular bodies. Many of ...

Review of liquid-crystal phase transitions with quenched random disorder

Recent experimental and theoretical efforts have focused on using liquid-crystal systems as a test bed for understanding the statistical mechanics of quenched random disorder. In particular, the weakly first-order isotropic to nematic (I–N) and the second-order nematic to smectic-A (N–SmA) phase transitions have been intensely studied under two, topologically distinct configurations: (I) confin...

Blue-phase liquid crystal droplets.

Blue phases of liquid crystals represent unique ordered states of matter in which arrays of defects are organized into striking patterns. Most studies of blue phases to date have focused on bulk properties. In this work, we present a systematic study of blue phases confined into spherical droplets. It is found that, in addition to the so-called blue phases I and II, several new morphologies ari...

Modeling Spatial Distribution of Intracellular Organelles by Molecular Motors

Orientational multiplicity and transitions in liquid crystalline droplets.

Orientation distributions in droplets of liquid crystals with homeotropic anchoring are computed with a simulated annealing algorithm that minimizes the free energy of the Oseen-Frank continuum theory. The droplets exhibit multiple orientational steady states that are separated by finite energy barriers over the entire range of the dimensionless ratio of surface to elastic forces, with maximum ...