Related papers: Universal Sequence Replication, Reversible Polymer…
Field-theoretical method is efficient in predicting the assembling structures of polymeric systems. However, for the polymer/nanoparticle mixture, the continuous density description is not suitable to capture the realistic assembly of…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
Polymers play a crucial role in the development of engineering materials, with applications ranging from mechanical to biomedical fields. However, the limited polymerization processes constrain the variety of organic building blocks that…
We analyze the motion of individual beads of a polymer chain using a discrete version of De Gennes' reptation model that describes the motion of a polymer through an ordered lattice of obstacles. The motion within the tube can be evaluated…
The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…
We study the conformational properties of complex polymer macromolecules, consisting in general of $n$ subsequently connected chains (blocks) of different lengths and distinct chemical structure. Depending on the solvent conditions, the…
A biological system consists of a variety of polymers that are synthesized from monomers, by catalysis that exists only for some long polymers. It is important to elucidate the emergence and sustenance of such autocatalytic polymerization.…
The RNA world hypothesis suggests a pathway of how life emerged on early earth. It assumes that life started with RNA based systems, capable of storing, transmitting and replicating information, envisioning that monomers and short RNA…
The famous Miller-Urey experiment, which provides essential information on the prebiotic synthesis of the molecules of life, still has many obscure points. In this paper, we want to suggest a way of possible future progress, which consists…
Conformation-dependent design of polymer sequences can be considered as a tool to control macromolecular self-assembly. We consider the monomer unit sequences created via the modification of polymers in a homogeneous melt in accordance with…
We study the diffusion of a linear polymer in the presence of permeable membranes without excluded volume interactions, using scaling theory and Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the average time it takes for a chain with polymerization…
In a similar way in which the folding of single--domain proteins provide an important test in the study of self--organization, the folding of homodimers constitute a basic challenge in the quest for the mechanisms which are at the basis of…
Cooperative behavior, the costly provision of benefits to others, is common across all domains of life. This review article discusses cooperative behavior in the microbial world, mediated by the exchange of extracellular products called…
Recent years have witnessed the detection of an increasing number of complex organic molecules in interstellar space, some of them being of prebiotic interest. Disentangling the origin of interstellar prebiotic chemistry and its connection…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
A core topic of research in prebiotic chemistry is the search for plausible synthetic routes that connect the building blocks of modern life such as sugars, nucleotides, amino acids, and lipids to "molecular food sources" that have likely…
Synthetic and biological living polymers are self-assembling chains whose chain length distributions (CLDs) are dynamic. We show these dynamics are ultrasensitive: even a small perturbation (e.g. temperature jump) non-linearly distorts the…
An innovative method is proposed to generate configurations of coarse grained models for polymer melts. This method, largely inspired by chemical ``radical polymerization'', is divided in three stages: (i) nucleation of radicals (reacting…
The structure and function of polymers in confined environments, e.g., biopolymers in the cytoplasm of a cell, are strongly affected by macromolecular crowding. To explore the influence of solvent quality on conformations of crowded…
Rich information on the prebiotic evolution is still stored in contemporary genomic data. The statistical mechanism at the sequence level may play a significant role in the prebiotic evolution. Based on statistical analysis of genome…