Related papers: Modeling force-induced bio-polymer unfolding
We present a unified theory for the longitudinal dynamic response of a stiff polymer in solution to various external perturbations (mechanical excitations, hydrodynamic flows, electrical fields, temperature quenches ...) that can be…
We study the deformation of nano--scale polymer films which are subject to external bending forces by means of computer simulation. The polymer is represented by a generalized bead--spring--model, intended to reproduce characteristic…
We introduce a simple theoretical model, the Freely Jointed Chain with quenched hinges (qFJC), which captures the quenched disorder in the local bending stiffness of the polymer. In this article, we analyze the tensile elasticity of the…
We study the dynamics of a polymer, described as a variant of a Rouse chain, driven by an active terminal monomer (head). The local active force induces a transition from a globule-like to an elongated state, as revealed by the study of the…
We investigate the stretching response of a thick polymer model by means of extensive stochastic simulations. The computational results are synthesized in an analytic expression that characterizes how the force versus elongation curve…
In this paper, we mathematically describe the time evolution of protein folding features via Iori et al.'s heteropolymer model. More specifically, we identify that the folding amino acid chain evolve according to a power law $D \sim…
The freely rotating chain is one of the classic discrete models of a polymer in dilute solution. It consists of a broken line of N straight segments of fixed length such that the angle between adjacent segments is constant and the N-1…
Polymer chains undergoing a continuous adsorption-desorption transition are studied through extensive computer simulations. A three-dimensional self-avoiding walk lattice model of a polymer chain grafted onto a surface has been treated for…
Synthetic polymers have a distribution of chain lengths which can be characterized by dispersity, D. Macroscopic properties of polymers are influenced by chain mobility in the melt and manipulating D can significantly impact these…
Analytical relations for the mechanical response of single polymer chains are valuable for modeling purposes, on both the molecular and the continuum scale. These relations can be obtained using statistical thermodynamics and an idealized…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While stress-strain curves for a wide range of temperature can be fit to the functional form predicted by entropic network models, many other…
We study two cross-linked polymer systems in the strong stretching regime. The first consists of two polymers sharing one endpoint, with the other two endpoints coupled by a harmonic potential. Within the weakly bending approximation, we…
We study the structural and dynamical behaviors of a diblock copolymer chain in a bath of active Brownian particles (ABPs) by extensive Brownian dynamics simulation in a two-dimensional model system. Specifically, the A block of chain is…
Granular chain packings exhibit a striking emergent strain-stiffening behavior despite the individual looseness of the constitutive chains. Using indentation experiments on such assemblies, we measure an exponential increase in the…
We present a theoretical analysis of a simple model of the depinning of an anchored semiflexible polymer from a fixed planar substrate in (1+1) dimensions. We consider a polymer with a discrete sequence of pinning sites along its contour.…
Single molecule experiments on single- and double stranded DNA have sparked a renewed interest in the force-extension of polymers. The extensible Freely Jointed Chain (FJC) model is frequently invoked to explain the observed behavior of…
We study energy relaxation in a phenomenological model for polymer built from rheological considerations: a one dimensional nonlinear lattice with dissipative couplings. These couplings are well known in polymer's community to be possibly…
We consider three different continuum polymer models, that all depend on a tunable parameter r that determines the strength of the excluded-volume interactions. In the first model chains are obtained by concatenating hard spherocylinders of…
Force-clamp spectroscopy reveals the unfolding and disulfide bond rupture times of single protein molecules as a function of the stretching force, point mutations and solvent conditions. The statistics of these times reveal whether the…
We study the effect of physical confinement on the capillary infiltration of polymers into cylindrical nanopores using molecular dynamics simulations. In particular, we probe whether the critical contact angle above which capillary rise…