Wetting, budding, and fusion—morphological transitions of soft surfaces

Biomimetic systems typically contain soft surfaces such as fluid interfaces or bilayer membranes that attain a large variety of different shapes and undergo morphological transitions between those shapes. This article briefly reviews several different examples from a unified perspective: liquids at chemically patterned and/or topographically structured surfaces; the formation of membrane buds from membrane domains; and the fusion of bilayer membranes and vesicles.