Xueping Zhao

Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems | MPIPKS · Division of Biological Physics

Tight junctions play an essential role in sealing tissues, by forming belts of adhesion strands around cellular perimeters. The formation of a tight junction occurs into two steps, initiation at cell-cell contacts, and elongation around the perimeter. Recent work has shown that nucleation is governed by condensation of scaffold proteins. However, t...

Formation of biomolecular condensates via phase separation enables compartmentation of many cellular processes. However, how cells can control condensation at specific locations to create complex cellular structures remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the mechanism of tight junction formation, which involves condensation of scaffold pr...

In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we investigate how binding to membranes affects wetting, prewetting and surface phase transitions. We derive a therm...

Phase separation and transitions among different molecular states are ubiquitous in living cells. Such transitions can be governed by local equilibrium thermodynamics or by active processes controlled by biological fuel. It remains largely unexplored how the behavior of phase-separating systems with molecular transitions differs between thermodynam...

In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we investigate how binding to membranes affects surface phase transitions such as wetting and prewetting. We derive...

Phase separation and transitions among different molecular states are ubiquitous in living cells. Such transitions can be governed by local equilibrium thermodynamics or by active processes controlled by biological fuel. It remains largely unexplored how the behavior of phase-separating systems with molecular transitions differs between thermodynam...

We present a set of linear, second order, unconditionally energy stable schemes for the Allen-Cahn equation with nonlocal constraints that preserves the total volume of each phase in a binary material system. The energy quadratization strategy is employed to derive the energy stable semi-discrete numerical algorithms in time. Solvability conditions...

We present a linear, second order fully discrete numerical scheme on a staggered grid for a thermodynamically consistent hydrodynamic phase field model of binary compressible fluid flows, derived from the generalized Onsager Principle. The hydrodynamic model possesses not only the variational structure in its constitutive equation, but also warrant...

We present a systematic derivation of thermodynamically consistent hydrodynamic phase field models for compressible viscous fluid mixtures using the generalized Onsager principle. By maintaining momentum conservation while enforcing mass conservation at different levels, we obtain two compressible models. When the fluid components in the mixture ar...

We present a linear, second order fully discrete numerical scheme on a staggered grid for a thermodynamically consistent hydrodynamic phase field model of binary compressible fluid flow mixtures derived from the generalized Onsager Principle. The hydrodynamic model not only possesses the variational structure, but also warrants the mass, linear mom...

We present a general approach to deriving energy stable numerical approximations for thermodynamical consistent models for nonequilibrium phenomena. The central idea behind the systematic numerical approximation is the energy quadratization (EQ) strategy, where the sys-tem’s free energy is transformed into a quadratic form by introducing new interm...