New paper on genetic recombination during meiosis

The first results from our collaboration with Raphael Mercier from MPI-PZ was recently published in Nature Communications. In this paper, we describe how little droplets on condensed chromosomes determine where the maternal and paternal chromosomes combine during meiosis. Our work provides evidence for a recently emerged coarsening model in this important step during sexual reproduction.

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Manuscript on simulating interacting active droplets

We uploaded a preprint on the main results from Ajinkya’s PhD thesis on arxiv. In this slightly technical work, we propose a new numerical algorithm to simulate interacting active droplets.

The main idea of the algorithm is to only simulate the relevant degrees of freedom, which in our case are droplet radii & positions as well as large-scale information about the background field. This reduced set of variables can be evolved in time much faster than the usual fine-grained fields necessary for a full description of the phase separation process, e.g., using a Cahn-Hilliard equation. We are now in a position to simulate systems of much larger size for longer evolution times, optionally also with (active) chemical turnover and imposed chemical gradients; see the inset. To develop the algorithm, and in particular couple the dynamics of the droplets to the background field, we leveraged analytical results to bridge length scales. In the future, this approach will allow us to explorer dynamics that are relevant to the behavior of droplets in biological cells and other challenging situations that were previously not numerically accessible.

Ajinkya defended his Ph.D.

Ajinkya defended his Ph.D. today and thus became the second student to graduate in our group! He gave an extremely clear talk and answered all questions by the committee. His work on “Effective simulations of interacting droplets” describes a novel method to simulate active droplets that interact with each other. His work will form the basis of future extensions that we will work on in the group. In the long term, his work will thus contribute to effective simulations of biomolecular condensates in complex situations, like those in cells. Congratulations, Ajinkya!