Figure 6.

Highly schematic picture of a cross section of a 200-nm casein micelle according to the sponge model. The micelle is made of soft and hard regions represented here as Voronoi cells of ∼25 nm in size. The soft regions are voids filled with solvent and the hard regions contain all the CaP and protein materials. According to our description of the model, the hard regions are also decomposed into cells that contain either one CaP nanocluster (dark cells) or casein molecules and solvent (lighter cells).