Novel physics arising from phase transitions in biology

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.

38 pages, 15 figures. Invite topical review to appear in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics

References in corpus (12)

• Motility-Induced Phase Separation
• Meso-scale turbulence in living fluids
• Statistical Mechanics of Interacting Run-and-Tumble Bacteria
• Phase transition in the collective migration of tissue cells: experiment and model
• Phase transitions in biological systems with many components
• Theories of Binary Fluid Mixtures: From Phase-Separation Kinetics to Active Emulsions
• Critical behavior of active Brownian particles
• Chemical reaction-controlled phase separated drops: Formation, size selection, and coarsening
• Instabilities in complex mixtures with a large number of components
• Critical motility-induced phase separation belongs to the Ising universality class
• Stress granule formation via ATP depletion-triggered phase separation
• Droplet Ripening in Concentration Gradients

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Comparative Roles of Charge, $\pi$ and Hydrophobic Interactions in Sequence-Dependent Phase Separation of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
• Run-and-tumble motion: field theory and entropy production
• Suppression of coarsening and emergence of oscillatory behavior in a Cahn-Hilliard model with nonvariational coupling
• Controlling composition of coexisting phases via molecular transitions
• Scaling Law and Universal Drop Size Distribution of Coarsening in Conversion-Limited Phase Separation
• Universal limiting behaviour of reaction-diffusion systems with conservation laws
• Uncovering novel phase transitions in dense dry polar active fluids using a lattice Boltzmann method
• Scaling behaviour of non-equilibrium planar $N$-atic spin systems under weak fluctuations
• Surface wetting by kinetic control of liquid-liquid phase separation