Model for curvature-driven pearling instability in membranes

Abstract

A phase-field model for dealing with dynamic instabilities in membranes is presented. We use it to study curvature-driven pearling instability in vesicles induced by the anchorage of amphiphilic polymers on the membrane. Within this model, we obtain the morphological changes reported in recent experiments. The formation of a homogeneous pearled structure is achieved by consequent pearling of an initial cylindrical tube from the tip. For high enough concentration of anchors, we show theoretically that the homogeneous pearled shape is energetically less favorable than an inhomogeneous one, with a large sphere connected to an array of smaller spheres.

Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (5)

• Pearling Instabilities of Membrane Tubes with Anchored Polymers
• Osmotically Driven Shape Transformations in Axons
• Dynamic model and stationary shapes of fluid vesicles
• Spontaneous Curvature-induced pearling instability
• Shape instabilities in vesicles: a phase-field model

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• Capillary Thinning of Elastic and Viscoelastic Threads: from Elastocapillarity to Phase Separation
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• Pearling instability of membrane tubes driven by curved proteins and actin polymerization
• Kinetic roughening in a realistic model of non-conserved interface growth
• Transport Phenomena in Fluid Films with Curvature Elasticity
• Excitable reaction-diffusion waves of curvature-inducing proteins on deformable membrane tubes