2024/05/02 by Yicheng Qiang, Chengjie Luo, Qiang, Yicheng +3 · 1 voice
Chemical Engineering · Chemistry · Materials Science · #Electrostatics and Colloid Interactions #Material Dynamics and Properties #Thermodynamic properties of mixtures #cond-mat.soft #physics.bio-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.01138
openalex publication_date 2024/05/02 · openalex created_date 2024/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Liquid mixtures of many interacting components often exhibit numerous coexisting types of droplets. An exciting example is the cytosol of biological cells, where diverse droplets, called condensates, are essential for cellular function. However, how much their formation is constrained by thermodynamics is currently unclear. Linear stability analysis predicts that homogeneous mixtures become more robust to fluctuations as the number of components increases, suggesting that droplets do not form easily in multicomponent mixtures. In contrast, we show through numerical simulations and analytical scaling laws that the number of coexisting phases typically increases with the number of components in equilibrium. The combination of both results suggests that generic multicomponent mixtures can maintain many metastable states with various droplets, generalizing the nucleation-and-growth regime of binary mixtures. Our theory also indicates why cells exhibit much fewer condensates than components and how they could exploit multistability to independently form various condensates.