A computational study of lateral phase separation in biological membranes

Summary

Conservative and non‐conservative phase‐field models are considered for the numerical simulation of lateral phase separation and coarsening in biological membranes. An unfitted finite element method is devised for these models to allow for a flexible treatment of complex shapes in the absence of an explicit surface parametrization. For a set of biologically relevant shapes and parameter values, the paper compares the dynamic coarsening produced by conservative and non‐conservative numerical models, its dependence on certain geometric characteristics and convergence to the final equilibrium.

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