Publications by Julian Charles Shillcock

A Versatile Approach to Stabilize Liquid-Liquid Interfaces using Surfactant Self-Assembly

Stabilizing liquid-liquid interfaces, whether between miscible or immiscible liquids, is crucial for a wide range of applications, including energy storage, microreactors, and biomimetic structures. In this study, a versatile approach for stabilizing the w ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2024

Can you Teach Cell Biology using Computer Simulations?

Julian Charles Shillcock

Computational modelling is important in the life sciences, but students may not be greatly exposed to it in typical curricula.This paper describes an innovative, one-semester Master's level course in cell biology that uses computer simulations as the prima ...

European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI)2024

Macromolecular Crowding Is Surprisingly Unable to Deform the Structure of a Model Biomolecular Condensate

Julian Charles Shillcock

Simple Summary The cytoplasm of a living cell is a crowded place, containing hundreds of types of protein and other macromolecules. Cells reliably and continually perform thousands of biochemical reactions to maintain their health. Biomolecular condensates ...

2023

POETS: An Event-driven Approach to Dissipative Particle Dynamics

Julian Charles Shillcock

HPC clusters have become ever more expensive, both in terms of capital cost and energy consumption; some estimates suggest that competitive installations at the end of the next decade will require their own power station. One way around this looming proble ...

2023

Computational synthesis of cortical dendritic morphologies

Henry Markram, Kathryn Hess Bellwald, Lida Kanari, Julian Charles Shillcock, Hugo Thabo Dictus, Werner Alfons Hilda Van Geit, Alexis Arnaudon, Benoît Jean-Albert Coste

Neuronal morphologies provide the foundation for the electrical behavior of neurons, the connectomes they form, and the dynamical properties of the brain. Comprehensive neuron models are essential for defining cell types, discerning their functional roles, ...

CELL PRESS2022

Investigating the morphological transitions in an associative surfactant ternary system

Julian Charles Shillcock

Associative surfactants systems involving polar oils have recently been shown to stabilize immiscible liquids by forming nanostructures at the liquid interface and have been used to print soft materials. Although these associating surfactant systems show g ...

2022

Non-monotonic fibril surface occlusion by GFP tags from coarse-grained molecular simulations

Hilal Lashuel, Julian Charles Shillcock

The pathological growth of amyloid fibrils in neurons underlies the progression of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Fibrils form whensoluble monomers oligomerise in the cytoplasm. Their subsequent growth occurs via ...

2022

Model biomolecular condensates have heterogeneous structure quantitatively dependent on the interaction profile of their constituent macromolecules

Julian Charles Shillcock

Biomolecular condensates play numerous roles in cells by selectively concentrating client proteins while excluding others. These functions are likely to be sensitive to the spatial organization of the scaffold proteins forming the condensate. We use coarse ...

2022

Coupling Bulk Phase Separation of Disordered Proteins to Membrane Domain Formation in Molecular Simulations on a Bespoke Compute Fabric

Julian Charles Shillcock

Phospholipid membranes surround the cell and its internal organelles, and their multicomponent nature allows the formation of domains that are important in cellular signalling, the immune system, and bacterial infection. Cytoplasmic compartments are also c ...

2022

Computational Approaches to Explore Bacterial Toxin Entry into the Host Cell

Julian Charles Shillcock

Many bacteria secrete toxic protein complexes that modify and disrupt essential processes in the infected cell that can lead to cell death. To conduct their action, these toxins often need to cross the cell membrane and reach a specific substrate inside th ...

2021