Figure 2.

Mean field theory predicts arrested coarsening with protein modification. (A) Dispersion relation, showing the growth rate, λ, as a function of the magnitude of the wavevector, q, for fluctuations around the uniform solution of Eq. 2, for $\mathcal{D}$ = A = 1, and X = 3.5 (cyan), corresponding to linear stability of the uniform phase, X = X_c = 4.0 (blue), marking the onset of instability, and X = 4.5 (red), revealing the growth of clusters with a characteristic length scale. (Dotted black line) Typical dispersion relation in the absence of protein modification, which leads to a long wavelength instability. (B) Scaling between number of proteins in a cluster and switching rate found from Brownian dynamics simulations. Points show saturation values (±SD) of number of particles per cluster N (after 1.5 × 10⁵ simulation units); the line shows a least-squares fit with a slope of −0.756. To see this figure in color, go online.