Related papers: Disordered, stretched, and semiflexible biopolymer…
Biomolecular condensates formed through the phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids are widely observed, offering a fundamental means of organizing intracellular materials in a membrane-less fashion. Traditionally, these condensates…
The shape of a polymer plays an important role in determining its interactions with other molecules and with the environment, and is in turn affected by both of them. As a consequence, in the literature the shape properties of a chain in…
The persistence length of macromolecules is one of their basic characteristics, describing their intrinsic local stiffness. However, it is difficult to extract this length from physical properties of the polymers, different recipes may give…
The cytoskeleton is an inhomogeneous network of semi-flexible filaments, which are involved in a wide variety of active biological processes. Although the cytoskeletal filaments can be very stiff and embedded in a dense and cross-linked…
We study the influence of some quenched disorder in the sequence of monomers on the entropic elasticity of long polymeric chains. Starting from the Kratky-Porod model, we show numerically that some randomness in the favoured angles between…
We present simulations on a binary blend of bead-spring polymer chains. The introduction of monomer size disparity yields very different relaxation times for each component of the blend. Competition between two different arrest mechanisms,…
We present an analytical theory for heteropolymer deformation, as exemplified experimentally by stretching of single protein molecules. Using a mean-field replica theory, we determine phase diagrams for stress-induced unfolding of typical…
The dynamics of flexible polymer molecules are often assumed to be governed by hydrodynamics of the solvent. However there is considerable evidence that internal dissipation of a polymer contributes as well. Here we investigate the dynamics…
The mechanics of disordered fibrous networks such as those that make up the extracellular matrix are strongly dependent on the local connectivity or coordination number. For biopolymer networks this coordination number is typically between…
We study the dynamics of driven polymer translocation using both molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and a theoretical model based on the non-equilibrium tension propagation on the {\it cis} side subchain. We present theoretical and…
The effect of a finite torque on semiflexible polymers in a confined environment is investigated. It is shown how a new lengthscale appears in the strongly confined limit. The influence of a torque on the extension of biopolymers in…
We study a minimal extension of the worm-like chain to describe polypeptides having alpha-helical secondary structure. In this model presence/absence of secondary structure enters as a scalar variable that controls the local chain bending…
We address the general question of how the molecular weight dependence of chain dynamics in unentangled polymers is modified by blending. By dielectric spectroscopy we measure the normal mode relaxation of polyisoprene in blends with a slow…
We investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer confined to a square box. Results of Monte Carlo simulations show the existence of a shape transition when the persistence length of the polymer becomes comparable to the dimensions…
For biologically relevant macromolecules such as intrinsically disordered proteins, internal degrees of freedom that allow for shape changes have a large influence on both the motion and function of the compound. A detailed understanding of…
A conceptual difficulty in the Hooke's-law description of ideal Gaussian polymer-chain elasticity is sometimes apparent in analyses of experimental data or in physical models designed to simulate the behavior of biopolymers. The problem,…
The dynamics of loop formation by linear polymer chains has been a topic of several theoretical/experimental studies. Formation of loops and their opening are key processes in many important biological processes. Loop formation in flexible…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
The statistical mechanics of a ribbon polymer made up of two semiflexible chains is studied using both analytical techniques and simulation. The system is found to have a crossover transition at some finite temperature, from a type of short…
We present a unified scaling theory for the dynamics of monomers for dilute solutions of semiflexible polymers under good solvent conditions in the free draining limit. Our theory encompasses the well-known regimes of mean square…