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.
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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 shown that some morphologies found in actual stromatolite structures cannot be formed as a consequence of a process modelled exclusively in terms of the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation and acting over sufficiently large times, suggesting the need to search for alternative mathematical approaches to model these structures.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider a dynamical field theory (Active Model B+) that minimally extends the equilibrium Model B for diffusive phase separation of a scalar field, by adding leading-order terms that break time-reversal symmetry.
TL;DR: It is indicated that ATP is continuously hydrolysed to deter SG formation under normal conditions, and specific predictions that can be tested experimentally are provided.
TL;DR: Numerical measurements of holes within a standard percolation backbone give the same size-distribution exponent τ=1.82(1) as found for the NEP model, and this suggests that the gel clusters are of the universality class of percolations cluster holes.
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.