Fig. 3. Depletion forces yield a quasi-crystalline arrangement of ERES. (a) Distributing ERES positions randomly and independently in a circular cell with radius 15 µm (inset: typical configuration) yields the anticipated agreement of the numerically determined p(s) (histogram) with Eqn 1 (shown dashed). Owing to the imposed hard-core radius (200 nm) of the ERES, very small distances (s<0.2) are not observed. (b) Reducing the probability to locate an ERES next to a pre-existing one with a Gaussian filter (see main text and Materials and Methods) yields an almost perfect agreement with the results from the model (Eqn 2; unbroken line).