Multiple new publications

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The group has been exceptionally productive in the last months: We wrote a detailed theory work on the “Coarsening model of chromosomal crossover placement”, which explains how the positions of genetic information exchange are determined during meiosis. We showed that “Chemically Active Liquid Bridges Generate Repulsive Forces”, which is opposite to what one would expect from a passive liquid bridge. We also showed that “Advection selects pattern in multi-stable emulsions of active droplets” and that “Exchange controls coarsening of surface condensates”. These (and older works) can be thought of as “Phase separation with non-local interactions”, and our “Size control guidelines for chemically active droplets” finally allow us to understand basic mechanisms of chemically active droplets better.

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New publications

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We have several new manuscripts:

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New paper on genetic recombination during meiosis

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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

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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.