Atul Parikh
University of California-Davis, CA·Biophysics
The inside of a living cell is tiny and extremely crowded with proteins, sugars and nucleic acids. Many of these large molecules prefer some neighbors and avoid others.
- Fields
Biophysics
Chemistry
Materials Science
- Topics
liquid-liquid phase separation
giant vesicles
lipid membranes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Quantify how liquid droplets coarsen, growing and merging over time, during liquid-liquid phase separation confined inside giant vesicles, using fluorescence microscopy and quantitative image analysis.
- Map how osmotically induced macromolecular crowding inside vesicles relates to membrane remodeling. Test whether internal crowding reorganizes membrane domains and changes overall vesicle shape.
- Characterize how the dynamics of phase separation and the membrane boundary are coupled in more complex internal mixtures, including reconstituted biopolymers.
- Compare segregative phase separation of water-soluble polymers, which forms aqueous two-phase systems, with associative phase separation of coacervating biopolymers inside cell-sized membrane compartments.
More about the research
As a result, the cell's interior separates into coexisting liquids of different composition, much like the blobs in a lava lamp. This liquid-liquid phase separation helps organize cell contents and carry out cellular tasks. The project asks how phase separation inside a membrane-bound space affects the membrane boundary and the shape of the compartment itself.
Why it matters
This work adds basic understanding of how crowding and liquid-liquid phase separation inside a confined, cell-like compartment can reorganize and reshape the compartment's membrane. That knowledge could eventually inform models of how living cells organize their crowded interiors and how internal organization relates to cell shape.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sarah Keller
University of Washington, WA·Biophysics
Test whether asymmetric lipid vesicles, membrane bubbles with different lipids in each layer like real cells, undergo liquid-liquid phase separation the same way as flat, taut membranes.
John Straub
Boston University, MA·Biophysics
Identify factors that govern liquid-liquid phase separation and later amyloid aggregation of the disordered proteins tau and alpha-synuclein, combining experiments with computer simulations.
Julia Von Blume
Yale University, CT·Biology
Define the molecular requirements for chromogranins and Cab45 to form liquid condensates by liquid-liquid phase separation, using reconstituted systems that mimic the chemical environment inside the trans-Golgi Network.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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