Take a deeper dive into the concept of free energy in these two videos created by Mariona Esquerda Ciutat, a science communicator at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany.
Cells can be described as systems made of different phases. For instance, biomolecular condensates are dense droplets of proteins that coexist with the rest of the cytoplasm. Thermodynamics is a helpful theoretical framework to understand phases in cells. In this video we explain the concept of Free Energy of a mixture and we see how can we predict the equilibrium state of the system from the Free Energy.
If we want to understand phases in cells we need to talk about the Free Energy of a thermodynamic system. This is the second part of the video “Diving into the Free Energy”. In this video, we will understand how thermodynamic mixtures reach equilibrium by minimising the Free Energy. We will see that asking if a mixture will phase separate or not is the same as asking what is the minimum energy allowed to the mixture. Not only that, we will also show how the Binodal line on the Phase Diagram directly emerges from the Free Energy!
Check out Mariona's other videos below!