Critical Casimir forces in cellular membranes

Abstract

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.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Effective field theory approach to fluctuation-induced forces between colloids at an interface
• Defect-Mediated Emulsification in Two Dimensions

Cited by in corpus (63)

• Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments
• A Materials Perspective on Casimir and van der Waals Interactions
• Origin of similarity of phase diagrams in amphiphilic and colloidal systems with competing interactions
• Physical mechanisms of micro- and nanodomain formation in multicomponent lipid membranes
• Casimir Effect in Active Matter Systems
• Collective behavior of colloids due to critical Casimir interactions
• Nonadditivity of Critical Casimir Forces
• Surface Densities Prewet a Near-Critical Membrane
• Critical Casimir Forces and Colloidal Phase Transitions in a Near-Critical Solvent : A Simple Model Reveals a Rich Phase Diagram
• Critical Casimir Effect: Exact Results
• Casimir-like forces at the percolation transition
• Sign Flip in the Casimir Force for Interacting Fermion Systems
• Entanglement entropy after a partial projective measurement in $1+1$ dimensional conformal field theories: exact results
• Normal form for renormalization groups
• Critical Casimir torques and forces acting on needles in two spatial dimensions
• Conformal Field Theory of Critical Casimir Interactions in 2D
• Many-body critical Casimir interactions in colloidal suspensions
• Complex networks with tuneable dimensions as a universality playground
• Periodic ordering of clusters in a one-dimensional lattice model
• A bifurcation integrates information from many noisy ion channels
• Long range mediated interactions in a mixed dimensional system
• Diffusion of a particle quadratically coupled to a thermally fluctuating field
• A rationale for mesoscopic domain formation in biomembranes
• Entanglement entropy after selective measurements in quantum chains
• Critical Casimir forces along the iso-fields
• Thermal Casimir effect for the scalar field in flat spacetime under a helix boundary condition
• Direct simulation of critical Casimir forces
• Computation of a Theoretical Membrane Phase Diagram, and the Role of Phase in Lipid Raft-Mediated Protein Organization
• Formation probabilities in quantum critical chains and Casimir effect
• Fluctuation-induced Interactions in Micro- and Nano-systems: Survey of Some Basic Results
• Protein driven lipid domain nucleation in biological membranes
• Critical Casimir interaction between colloidal Janus-type particles in two spatial dimensions
• Polymer brush-induced depletion interactions and clustering of membrane proteins
• Dynamics and steady states of a tracer particle in a confined critical fluid
• Critical Casimir forces between defects in the 2D Ising model
• Critical Casimir forces for O(N) models from functional renormalization
• Critical Casimir Force between Inhomogeneous Boundaries
• Finite size corrections to scaling of the formation probabilities and the Casimir effect in the conformal field theories
• Fluctuation-induced forces between rings threaded around a polymer chain under tension
• Critical dynamics of an isothermal compressible non-ideal fluid
• Classification of the sign of the critical Casimir force in two dimensional systems at asymptotically large separations
• Conformal field theory of critical Casimir forces between surfaces with alternating boundary conditions in two dimensions
• The Casimir effect for stack of graphenes
• Thermodynamic Casimir forces in strongly anisotropic systems within the $N\to \infty$ class
• Casimir interaction of rod-like particles in a two-dimensional critical system
• On The Critical Casimir Interaction Between Anisotropic Inclusions On A Membrane
• Action at a distance in transcriptional regulation
• Critical Casimir effects in 2D Ising model with curved defect lines
• The order-disorder transition in model lipid bilayers is a first-order hexatic to liquid phase transition
• Membrane-mediated interactions
• Drag Coefficient of a Circular Inclusion in a Near-Critical Binary Fluid Membrane
• Casimir forces for the ideal Bose gas in anisotropic optical lattices: the effect of alternating sign upon varying dimensionality
• Lattice models for protein organization throughout thylakoid membrane stacks
• Critical Casimir Interactions and Percolation: the quantitative description of critical fluctuations
• Holography for BCFTs with Multiple Boundaries: Multi-Splitting Quenches
• Allosteric Regulation by a Critical Membrane
• One-Loop Correction to the Casimir Energy in Lorentz-Violating ${\varphi }^4$ Theory with Rough Membrane Boundaries
• Thermal Casimir effect for a Dirac field on flat space with a nontrivial circular boundary condition
• Reversing the Critical Casimir force by shape deformation
• Liquid general anesthetics lower critical temperatures in plasma membrane vesicles
• Advanced Biophotonics techniques for cell and molecules manipulation associated with cancer and autoimmune diseases: the role of optical tweezers
• Casimir Energy for Lorentz-Violating Scalar Field with Helical Boundary Condition in d Spatial Dimensions
• Æther Coupling Effects on Casimir Energy for Self-Interacting Scalar Field within Extra Dimension