Related papers: Manipulating Biopolymer Dynamics by Anisotropic Na…
Ionic liquids constrained at interfaces or restricted in subnanometric pores are increasingly employed in modern technologies, including energy applications. Understanding the details of their behavior in these conditions is therefore…
The constraints imposed by nano- and microscale confinement on the conformational degrees of freedom of thermally fluctuating biopolymers are utilized in contemporary nano-devices to specifically elongate and manipulate single chains. A…
In cell membranes, proteins and lipids are organized into sub-micrometric nanodomains of varying size, shape and composition, performing specific functions. Despite their biological importance, the detailed morphology of these nanodomains…
In the cell, protein complexes form relying on specific interactions between their monomers. Excluded volume effects due to molecular crowding would lead to correlations between molecules even without specific interactions. What is the…
In living organisms, proteins and peptides are often under the influence of mechanical forces, especially in confined spaces such as membrane channels, ribosome exit tunnel, or proteasome gate. Due to the directional nature of proteins as…
Although wettability is a macroscopic manifestation of molecular-level forces, such as van der Waals (vdW) forces, the impact of nanoconfinement on material properties in reduced film thickness remains unexplored in predicting film…
The shape of biological shells, such as cell nuclei, membranes, and vesicles, often deviates from a perfect sphere due to an interplay of complex interactions with a myriad of molecular structures. In particular, semiflexible biopolymers…
We use molecular dynamics simulations to study a semidilute, unentangled polymer solution containing well dispersed, weakly attractive nanoparticles (NP) of size ($\sigma_N$) smaller than the polymer radius of gyration $R_g$. We find that…
The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena that cover such…
The remaining dynamical degrees of freedom of molecular fluids confined into capillaries of nano to sub-nanometer diameter are of fundamental relevance for future developments in the field of nanofluidics. These properties cannot be simply…
Chemical reactions inside cells are typically subject to the effects both of the cell's confining surfaces and of the viscoelastic behavior of its contents. In this paper, we show how the outcome of one particular reaction of relevance to…
We analyze static properties of a strongly confined semiflexible polymer, i.e. either trapped in a closed space or compressed by external forces, in an athermal solvent. Like a flexible polymer case, we can resort to an analogy with the…
Quantum shape effect appears under the size-invariant shape transformations of strongly confined structures. Such a transformation distinctively influences the thermodynamic properties of confined particles. Due to their characteristic…
We investigated the translation of a protein through model nanopores using coarse-grained (CG) non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations and compared the mobilities with those obtained from previous coarse-grained equilibrium…
We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of semiflexible polymers driven by motor proteins (MPs) in two-dimensional motility assays under harmonic confinement. Using a coarse-grained agent-based model that incorporates stochastic motor…
Colloid or nanoparticle mobility under confinement is of central importance to a wide range of physical and biological processes. Here, we introduce a minimal model of particles in a hydrodynamic continuum to examine how particle shape and…
Recent advances in operating and manipulating DNA have provided unique experimental possibilities in many fields of DNA research, especially in gene therapy. Researchers have deployed many techniques, experimental and theoretical, to study…
In cellular environment, confinement and macromulecular crowding play an important role on thermal stability and folding kinetics of a protein. We have resorted to a generalized version of the Wako-Saito-Munoz-Eaton model for protein…
Nanocomposite films containing a high volume fraction (> 50vol%) of nanoparticles (NPs) in a polymer matrix are promising for their functionality and use as structural coatings, and also provide a unique platform to understand polymer…
We recast the problem of hydrogel swelling under physical constraints as an energy optimization problem. We apply this approach to compute equilibrium shapes of hydrogel spheres confined within a jammed matrix of rigid beads, and interpret…