Recently I was very honoured to be invited to Creative Futures 2017 by my old friend Mike Corcoran. Mike is something of a polymath, with a huge variety of interests in the arts, philosophy and science. We originally met at Durham University while queueing for one of the many administrative things that first-year students have to queue for. We were the only two people in the year doing our particular combination of physics and philosophy modules, and remained friends throughout.
We had a discussion about similarities, differences, shared joys and shared troubles in the arts and the sciences. It was a lot of fun and I felt like we could have sat there chatting for hours. A nice video of the talk is available here, made by the people at Filmage.
At last year’s Biophysical Society 2015 meeting, Peter Olmsted and I met Philip Fowler, who at the time worked in Mark Sansom‘s group (he now works in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford). I had noticed a signal in their lipid bilayer simulations that looked like a two-step asymmetry/symmetry transition we had studied theoretically. Understanding how constituents of a lipid bilayer interact and self-organise is key to the biology of the cell membrane, as well as to applications of synthetic lipid bilayer membranes.
It has been a pleasure to work with Phil and Mark over the past year as we have looked closely into the symmetry and asymmetry of phase-separating bilayers, using a raft (geddit?) of new simulations expertly constructed and analysed by Phil. A joint paper is out now in JACS, linking the kinetics of lipid bilayer phases to a theoretical model of competing inter-leaflet coupling effects. Check it out!
I was recently preparing a paper for an ACS journal and had a few issues with the bibliography style. Most of these were fixed by downloading the latest achemso.bst style file from here. However, it didn’t include that the journal seems to use only first pages (not ranges) when making references. That is, an article on pages 1897–1902 is referred to as:
Authors, Journal, Year, Volume, 1897
and not:
Authors, Journal, Year, Volume, 1897–1902.
So, using some information from here I have made a modified achemso.bst [link fixed 24/7/18] that uses only the first page. I don’t know about you but it always takes lot googling to figure out this stuff, so I’ve tried to make this post easily findable by those in a similar situation.
In this week’s issue of Physical Review Letters, a Comment written by me and Peter Olmsted is published. It concerns the nature of inter-leaflet coupling in bilayers, and specifically a claim in the original article that line tensions alone act to favour registration (symmetry) of domains.
A new paper with Peter Olmsted has just appeared in Physical Review E. Like our recent Soft Matter article, it builds on our theoretical study of coupled lipid bilayer leaflets, investigating the underlying model via direct simulation. We also give a broader look at the use of “leaflet-leaflet” phase diagrams, introduced in previous theoretical works, which allow a more natural interpretation of symmetry and asymmetry in bilayers.
Heads up! The final version of this paper has just been published in the excellent journal Soft Matter. The paper deals with the interesting phase-transition kinetics by which phase-separated regions (“domains”) within lipid bilayer membranes become symmetric between the two leaflets.
A couple of days ago, the April 21st 2015 issue of Biophysical Journal came out. My first paper with Peter Olmsted appears within and is featured on the cover! We studied the effects of inter-leaflet coupling in bilayers, and found fascinating kinetics driven by competing stable and metastable phase coexistences, involving registered (symmetric) and antiregistered lipid domains. I won’t go into more detail here, there is a blog post on the Biophysical Society Blog that tells you more.
I’ve recently been feeling more like an intern at Pixar than a scientist — yes, it’s time for some scientific imaging. In my field of simulation and theory, some form of imaging is important in a prosaic kind of way just to get a feel for what’s going on, and check for any disastrous bugs. But, more and more, it’s becoming a real mode of scientific communication. Journal covers commonly feature simulation renderings or even schematic artists’ impressions, as well as more traditional fare such as beautiful microscopy images. With the move towards online journal viewing (and sometimes, free colour printing), authors have more and more freedom to include beautiful renderings as a key, functional part of their scientific story.
I mostly use the incredibly versatile and intuitive OVITO package for the purpose. Recently I spent a while learning its intricacies (for example, the software Tachyon renderer for nice directional lighting). Here are a couple of images from the two main strands of my work. OVITO does a great job with both a typical 3D particle based simulation, and a quasi-3D rendering of a 2D lattice model with highly stylised cubic particles.
Colloids
First up, phase separation in polydisperse colloids. My latest paper in this area focused on methods of characterising the highly complex phase compositions and kinetics involved. The colours are computed from our new approach to measuring local concentration when a large spread of particle sizes exist, which turns out to be quite a subtle problem. The picture really helps get across just how highly polydisperse the fluid is, and we can even see by eye the way that larger particles, in this case, end up in the denser (liquid, hot colours) regions. Of course, all of this is supplemented with quantitative measurement and graphs, and the message could be got across without this picture. But: it’s beautiful; and it gives the reader an instinctive feel for both the setting of the work, and one of its key findings. The image was shortlisted as a J. Chem. Phys. cover image.
Gas-liquid phase separation in a highly polydisperse simulated fluid. Novel characterisation methods are used to study which particles end up where.
Membranes
Our manuscript in review [now accepted in Biophys. J.] provides a theory for how lipid bilayer domains do or don’t align between the leaflets. In fact, the theory began as a simulation — an idealised lattice model capturing a key physical feature, the thickness of the bilayer leaflets. It turned out to be idealised enough for pen-and-paper treatment, hence the resulting theory. But, directly simulating the model helps to corroborate the results and figure out what goes on over longer timescales that aren’t treated in the theory. Mapping membrane thickness as the z-coordinate allows the 2D simulation to be rendered in a quasi-3D manner, and the competing thicker and thinner phases can be seen nicely. OVITO allows cubic particles to be plotted. I used this to emphasise the underlying lattice nature of the model, but had the particles overlap in a ‘random-looking’ way partly for artistry, and partly to get across the fluctuating, messy nature of liquid phases in the bilayer at the molecular scale. The image was a finalist at the image contest of Biophysical Society’s annual meeting, and I came away with a nice big hard-back printed version to mount on the wall.
Rendering of an idealised lattice model for a lipid bilayer membrane. Separation into multiple metastable and equilibrium phases is possible due to the interaction between the bilayer’s two leaflets.
A few weeks ago I did my second-to-last gig in the UK, for a change leading a project and so being able to choose some tunes I’d always wanted to play but hadn’t. It was lovely to have some great friends in the audience, and in the band. George Millard kindly came up from London, and he and Ben brought some nice songs along too. There were lots of contrafacts, lots of bop and a few lovely ballads. I’ve uploaded a selection to a Soundcloud set and am making the PDFs available too. I just zipped up the folder containing the charts but it’s pretty easy to see how they fit together. Hopefully they’ll save people having to transcribe some of the less well-known ones themselves. Do tell me if you end up using them, it’d be nice to know.
My old PhD supervisor, Mike Evans, is an occasional writer for the Sky At Night magazine and also blogs for physicsfocus. A quick look at his writing in either of these settings demonstrates that as well as being an expert in his field (which, broadly, is mine), he’s something of a philosopher with a very wide range of scientific interests.
However, this post finds Mike writing on the subject closest to his professional heart: statistical physics. This branch of physics is fundamental to our understanding of the world because it deals with situations where we have more than “just a few” of a particular entity. Considering that something as simple as a glass of water comprises billions and billions of mutually interacting and constantly moving water molecules, its clearly important to have an approach that is practical in these cases.
Further, statistical physics unifies things: a vast cloud of cosmic dust is quite different to a small tube of a colloidal suspension. But they’re similar in some ways. One of these ways is that on the tiniest length scales, they’re both made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. But, as Mike nicely points out, this misses the (thermodynamically) large picture: the two systems are also similar in that they both contain a very large number of their constituent particles, so that statistics governs their large-scale behaviour. In fact, this is arguably their most important similarity. Read the post to learn more about universality in statistical physics.
For anyone who wants some exceedingly clear and enjoyable insights into the life of a professional scientist, I can’t recommend Mike’s writing enough. Check out his personal blog too!
John Williamson 