Related papers: Collapse transition of flexible homopolymers with …
Helical motifs are ubiquitious in macromolecular systems. The mechanism of spontaneous emergence of helicity is unknown, especially in cases where torsional interactions are absent. Emergence of helical order needs coordinated organization…
Using Langevin simulations, we find that simple 'generic' bead-and-spring homopolymer chains in a sufficiently bad solvent spontaneously develop helical order during the process of collapsing from an initially stretched conformation. The…
Helices are not generic outcomes of polymer collapse. Collapsed conformations of semiflexible polymers with isotropic attractions typically form globules, toroids, or rod-like structures, as seen in simulations and described by…
Molecular process of polymer collapse was reproduced by isothermal molecular dynamics simulation. The initial polymer chains were obtained by mean of random walks in continuum space. Two potential models were considered to represent short…
Generic interactions e.g. the Coulomb or other long ranged radially symmetric repulsive interactions between monomers of bead-spring model of a semi-flexible polymer induce instabilities in a initially straight polymer chain to form long…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
We investigate the crystallization of a single, flexible homopolymer chain using transition path sampling (TPS). The chain consists of N identical spherical monomers evolved according to Langevin dynamics. While neighboring monomers are…
We propose an off-lattice model for a self-avoiding homopolymer chain with two different competing attractive interactions, mimicking the hydrophobic effect and the hydrogen bond formation respectively. By means of Monte Carlo simulations,…
Biological molecules can form hydrogen bonds between nearby residues, leading to helical secondary structures. The associated reduction of configurational entropy leads to a temperature dependence of this effect: the "helix-coil…
We propose a potential for wormlike polymer chains which can be used to model the low-temperature conformational structures. We successfully reproduced helix ground states up to 6.5 helical loops, using the multicanonical Monte Carlo…
Configurations of a single semiflexible polymer is studied when it is pushed into a nanochannel in the case where the polymer persistence length $l_p$ is much longer than the channel diameter $D$, i.e. $l_p/D \gg 1$. Using numerical…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
We report that a dielectric polymer chain, constrained at both ends, sharply collapses when exposed to a high electric field. The chain collapse is driven by nonlocal dipolar interactions and anisotropic polarization of monomers, a…
We analyze the crystallization and collapse transition of a simple model for flexible polymer chains on simple cubic and face-centered cubic lattices by means of sophisticated chain-growth methods. In contrast to bond-fluctuation polymer…
Recently, it has been demonstrated [Magee et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 207802 (2006)] that isolated, square-well homopolymers can spontaneously break chiral symmetry and freeze into helical structures at sufficiently low temperatures. This…
We investigate the dynamics of the collapse of a single copolymer chain, when the solvent quality is suddenly quenched from good to poor. We employ Brownian dynamics simulations of a bead-spring chain model and incorporate fluctuating…
The thermodynamics of a homopolymeric chain with both Van der Waals and highly-directional hydrogen bond interaction is studied. The effect of hydrogen bonds is to reduce dramatically the entropy of low-lying states and to give raise to…
We explore the coupling between the helix-coil and coil-globule transitions of a helical polymer using Monte Carlo simulations. A very rich state diagram is found. Each state is characterized by a specific configuration of the chain which…
We analyze the freezing and collapse transition of a simple model for flexible polymer chains on simple cubic and face-centered cubic lattices by means of sophisticated chain-growth methods. In contrast to bond-fluctuation polymer models in…
We have analyzed the equilibrium response of chain molecules to stretching. For a homogeneous sequence of monomers, the induced transition from compact globule to extended coil below the $\theta$-temperature is predicted to be sharp. For…