In this paper, the authors discuss how driven chemical reactions can arrest universal coarsening kinetics expected from thermal phase separation, and how motility leads to the emergence of a novel universality class when the rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken in an incompressible fluid.
Abstract:
Phase transitions, such as the freezing of water and the magnetisation of a ferromagnet upon lowering the ambient temperature, are familiar physical phenomena. Interestingly, such a collective change of behaviour at a phase transition is also of importance to living systems. From cytoplasmic organisation inside a cell to the collective migration of cell tissue during organismal development and wound healing, phase transitions have emerged as key mechanisms underlying many crucial biological processes. However, a living system is fundamentally different from a thermal system, with driven chemical reactions (e.g., metabolism) and motility being two hallmarks of its nonequilibrium nature. In this review, we will discuss how driven chemical reactions can arrest universal coarsening kinetics expected from thermal phase separation, and how motility leads to the emergence of a novel universality class when the rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken in an incompressible fluid.
TL;DR: A minimal model for an active colloidal fluid in the form of self-propelled Brownian spheres that interact purely through excluded volume with no aligning interaction undergoes an analog of an equilibrium continuous phase transition, with a binodal curve beneath which the system separates into dense and dilute phases whose concentrations depend only on activity.
TL;DR: It is found that TAF15 has a unique charge distribution among the FET family members that enhances its interactions with the C-terminal domain of RNA polymerase II, suggesting that positive feedback between interacting transcriptional components drives localized phase separation to amplify gene expression.
TL;DR: In this article, the N-terminal intrinsically disordered region (IDR) of DEAD-box helicase Ddx4 was simulated to assess roles of electrostatic, hydrophobic, cation-π, and aromatic interactions in amino acid sequence-dependent LLPS.
TL;DR: The phenomena of cytoplasmic streaming, elastotaxis, and active mechanosensing find natural explanations within the model of hydrodynamic velocity, concentration, and stress fields in a suspension of active, energy-dissipating particles.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors derived a Doi-Peliti field theory and used it to calculate the entropy production and other observables in closed form, and all their results are exact.
TL;DR: It is found that epithelial cells (Madin-Darby canine kidney cell) migrated collectively along one direction on a collagen gel substrate, representing the collectiveness of multicellular movement.
TL;DR: Numerical evidence is presented indicating that spontaneous compartmentalization exploits general features of the phase diagram of a multicomponent biomolecular mixture, and shows that demixed domains are likely to segregate when the variance in the intermolecular interaction strengths exceeds a well-defined threshold.
TL;DR: The hydrodynamic theory of fluid, polar-ordered flocks is reanalyzed and it is found that the nonlinearities allowed in equilibrium do not stabilize long-ranged order in spatial dimensions d=2, in accord with the Mermin-Wagner theorem.
TL;DR: This model examines a self-propelled Voronoi (SPV) model of confluent tissues with an orientational feedback that aligns a cell's polarization with its local migration velocity and finds that aligning interactions facilitate collective motion and promote solidification.
TL;DR: Recent findings suggesting that intracellular protein bodies are active liquid-like drops that self-assemble within an intrinsically structured cytoplasm are discussed.
Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Novel physics arising from phase transitions in biology" ?
In this review, the authors will discuss how driven chemical reactions can arrest universal coarsening kinetics expected from thermal phase separation, and how motility leads to the emergence of a novel universality class when the rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken in an incompressible fluid.
Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Novel physics arising from phase transitions in biology" ?
In terms of outlook, the authors believe the following future directions will expand the horizon of both biology and physics. ( i ) In Sec. 2 the authors have studied how driven chemical reactions can stabilise a multidrop, ternary system. As the cell cytoplasm is a complex mixture of thousands of different molecules [ 82, 83 ] it will be interesting to see how these results may be modified in a many-component mixtures. Such a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 Novel physics arising from phase transitions in biology 32 structure naturally suggests a kind of repulsive interactions between drops, which may serve to stabilise a multi-drop system against coarsening via coalescence due to drop diffusion.