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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 13: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems I (joint session DY/BP)

BP 13.12: Talk

Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 12:45–13:00, BH-N 334

Manifestation of hidden degrees of freedom in dissipative self-assembly — •Seeralan Sarvaharman and Aljaz Godec — Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany

Dissipative self-assembly is crucial for the development and healthy functioning of biological systems. By breaking time-reversal symmetry in either the binding or unbinding process of at least one of the components, living organisms are able to assemble structures with much more diverse compositions in a robust fashion. One such example that is of fundamental biological relevance are microtubules. Through a process called “dynamic instability” these microtubules, which are made up of several filaments, grow and shrink depending on the instantaneous compositions of the filaments. The observable that is often used to quantify such dynamic instability is the length of the assembled microtubule. However, the ability to infer the many-body effects underlying this instability from the projected length observable has remained elusive. Here we address this challenge by considering a stochastic Ising-type model of microtubule assembly with thermodynamically consistent driving. Using a mixture of analytical techniques and computational methods we uncover the manifestation of many-body physics encoded the time-ordering of the length of the assembly.

Keywords: self-assembly; many-body physics; dynamic instability; Ising model; dissipative systems