Lipid and protein sorting and trafficking in intracellular pathways maintain cellular function and contribute to organelle homeostasis. Biophysical aspects of membrane shape coupled to sorting have recently received increasing attention. Here we determine membrane tube bending stiffness through measurements of tube radii, and demonstrate that the stiffness of ternary lipid mixtures depends on m...

We propose a mathematically rigorous method to measure the spontaneous curvature of a bilayer membrane by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, which provides description of the molecular mechanisms that cause the spontaneous curvature. As a main result, for the membrane setup investigated, the spontaneous curvature is proved to be a constant plus twice the mean curvature of the membrane in its t...

We derive new, sharp lower bounds for certain curvature functionals on the space of Riemannian metrics of a smooth compact 4manifold with a non-trivial Seiberg-Witten invariant. These allow one, for example, to exactly compute the infimum of the L2-norm of Ricci curvature for all complex surfaces of general type. We are also able to show that the standard metric on any complex hyperbolic 4manif...

We model the spontaneous assembly of a capsid (a virus' closed outer shell) from many copies of identical units, using entirely irreversible steps and only information local to the growing edge. Our model is formulated in terms of (i) an elastic Hamiltonian with stretching and bending stiffness and a spontaneous curvature, and (ii) a set of rate constants for the addition of new units or bonds....

We model the spontaneous assembly of a capsid (a virus’ closed outer shell) from many copies of identical units, using entirely irreversible steps and only information local to the growing edge. Our model is formulated in terms of (i) an elastic Hamiltonian with stretching and bending stiffness and a spontaneous curvature, and (ii) a set of rate constants for addition of new units or bonds. An ...

Pressure drop characteristics of turbulent flow through 90 degree pipe bends are numerically investigated by computational fluid dynamic simulation using k-ε RNG turbulence model with standard wall function. After the validation of present model against existing experimental results, a detailed study has been performed to investigate the pressure distribution and pressure drop characteristics o...

Combining analytic calculations, computer simulations, and classical density functional theory we determine the interfacial tension of orientable two-dimensional hard rectangles near a curved hard wall. Both a circular cavity holding the particles and a hard circular obstacle surrounded by particles are considered. We focus on moderate bulk densities (corresponding to area fractions up to 50%) ...

The quadratic form of the Dirac equation in a Riemann spacetime yields a gravitational gyromagnetic ratio κS = 2 for the interaction of a Dirac spinor with curvature. A gravitational gyromagnetic ratio κS = 1 is also found for the interaction of a vector field with curvature. It is shown that the Dirac equation in a curved background can be obtained as the square–root of the corresponding vecto...