A rapidly growing body of work in recent years has resulted in exciting advances in our understanding of the importance of biomolecular condensates (or, more generally, various forms of mesoscale to macroscale biological matter) and their transitions in biology and disease (1–3). At first glance, the physics of how liquids percolate through porous/granular materials or related concepts in network connectivity may not seem relevant to furthering our mechanistic understanding of biomolecular condensates. Interestingly, however, percolation theory has been extensively used in the related areas of polymer physics (4, 5) and phase transitions (as well as in numerous other fields). Now, in an exciting advance, Kar et al. (6) describe a combination of experimental, conceptual, and computational work that explores the connection between percolation physics and an important class of biomolecular condensation with links to neurodegenerative diseases.
展开▼
