Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Intracellular self-organization by interacting proteins canbe described using nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations for the densities of the protein's conformational states. Due to the nonlinearity of interactions, it is usually impossible to find the time evolution and equilibrium states for such systems analytically. A novel framework, recently developed by Halatek, Brauns, and Frey, using the concepts of mass redistribution and moving local equilibria is introduced. This framework leads to a two-dimensional phase-space analysis of the reaction--diffusion system, and thereby allows to easily describe and predict the emergence of phenomena like stability, instability, and finally pattern formation in such systems.