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Register a new userChiral twist drives raft formation and organization in membranes composed of rod-like particles
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Lipid rafts are hypothesized to facilitate protein interaction, tension regulation, and trafficking in biological membranes, but the mechanisms responsible for their formation and maintenance are not clear. Insights into many other condensed matter phenomena have come from colloidal systems, whose micron-scale particles mimic basic properties of atoms and molecules but permit dynamic visualization with single-particle resolution. Recently, experiments showed that bidisperse mixtures of filamentous viruses can self-assemble into colloidal monolayers with thermodynamically stable rafts exhibiting chiral structure and repulsive interactions. We quantitatively explain these observations by modeling the membrane particles as chiral liquid crystals. Chiral twist promotes the formation of finite-sized rafts and mediates a repulsion that distributes them evenly throughout the membrane. Although this system is composed of filamentous viruses whose aggregation is entropically driven by dextran depletants instead of phospholipids and cholesterol with prominent electrostatic interactions, colloidal and biological membranes share many of the same physical symmetries. Chiral twist can contribute to the behavior of both systems and may account for certain stereospecific effects observed in molecular membranes.
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We construct colloidal ``sticky rods from the semi-flexible filamentous fd virus and temperature-sensitive polymers poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM). The phase diagram of fd-PNIPAM system becomes independent of ionic strength at high salt concentration and low temperature, i.e. the rods are sterically stabilized by the polymer. However, the network of sticky rods undergoes a sol-gel transition as the temperature is raised. The viscoelastic moduli of fd and fd-PNIPAM suspensions are compared as a function of temperature, and the effect of ionic strength on the gelling behavior of fd-PNIPAM solution is measured. For all fluidlike and solidlike samples, the frequency-dependant linear viscoelastic moduli can be scaled onto universal master curves.
The paper studies the modes of vibrations of a lattice with rod-like particles, in a continuum model where the sites of the lattice are the connections among strings and rigid rods. In these structures then, translational and rotational degrees of freedom are strongly coupled. We will discuss in particular two-dimensional lattices with auxetic-like behaviour. Auxetics are materials with a negative Poisson elastic parameter, meaning that they have a lateral extension, instead to shrink, when they are stretched. We assume as auxetic-like two-dimensional structures, structures which do not collapse, when stretched in one of the in-plane directions. The presence of rigid rod-like particles in the lattice prevents the shrinking of the membrane. Complete bandgaps between acoustic and optical modes are observed in analogy with the behaviour of crystalline materials.
The effects of particle shape on the vibrational properties of colloidal glasses are studied experimentally. Ellipsoidal glasses are created by stretching polystyrene spheres to different aspect ratios and then suspending the resulting ellipsoidal particles in water at high packing fraction. By measuring displacement correlations between particles, we extract vibrational properties of the corresponding shadow ellipsoidal glass with the same geometric configuration and interactions as the source suspension but without damping. Low frequency modes in glasses composed of ellipsoidal particles with major/minor axis aspect ratios $sim$1.1 are observed to have predominantly rotational character. By contrast, low frequency modes in glasses of ellipsoidal particles with larger aspect ratios ($sim$3.0) exhibit a mix of rotational and translational character. All glass samples were characterized by a distribution of particles with different aspect ratios. Interestingly, even within the same sample it was found that small-aspect-ratio particles participate relatively more in rotational modes, while large-aspect-ratio particles tend to participate relatively more in translational modes.
In their search for metabolic resources microbes swim through viscous environments that present physical anisotropies, including steric obstacles across a wide range of sizes. Hydrodynamic forces are known to significantly alter swimmer trajectories near flat and low-curvature surfaces. In this work, we imaged hundreds-of-thousands of high-curvature scattering interactions between swimming bacteria and micro-fabricated pillars with radii from ~1 to ~10 cell lengths. As a function of impact parameter, cell-pillar interactions produced distinct chiral distributions for scattering angle -- including unexpected counter-rotator trajectories -- well-described by a sterics-only model. Our data and model suggest that alteration of swimmer trajectories is subject to distinct mechanisms when interacting with objects of different size; primarily steric for objects below ~10 cell lengths and requiring incorporation of hydrodynamics at larger scales. These alterations in trajectory impact swim dynamics and may affect microbial populations in ways that depend on the shape and placement of obstacles within an environment.
The kinetics of isotropic-nematic (I-N) and nematic-isotropic (N-I) phase transitions in dispersions of rod-like {it fd}-viruses are studied. Concentration quenches were applied using pressure jumps in combination with polarization microscopy, birefringence and turbidity measurements. The full biphasic region could be accessed, resulting in the construction of a first experimental analogue of the bifurcation diagram. The N-I spinodal points for dispersions of rods with varying concentrations of depletion agents (dextran) were obtained from orientation quenches, using cessation of shear flow in combination with small angle light scattering. We found that the location of the N-I spinodal point is independent of the attraction, which was confirmed by theoretical calculations. Surprisingly, the experiments showed that also the absolute induction time, the critical nucleus and the growth rate are insensitive of the attraction, when the concentration is scaled to the distance to the phase boundaries.
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