Critical Casimir forces in cellular membranes

Details Critical Casimir forces in cellular membranes Critical Casimir forces in cellular membranes

2012-03-09

arxiv.org/abs/1203.2199v1

Biology

Quantitative Biology

Quantitative Methods

5 pages, 3 figures

Scientific paper

Recent experiments suggest that membranes of living cells are tuned close to a miscibility critical point in the 2D Ising universality class. We propose that one role for this proximity to criticality in live cells is to provide a conduit for relatively long-ranged critical Casimir forces. Using techniques from conformal field theory we calculate potentials of mean force between membrane bound inclusions mediated by their local interactions with the composition order parameter. We verify these calculations using Monte-Carlo where we also compare critical and off-critical results. Our findings suggest that membrane bound proteins experience weak yet long range forces mediated by critical composition fluctuations in the plasma membranes of living cells.

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