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Topological constraints (TCs) between polymers determine the behaviour of complex fluids such as creams, oils and plastics. Most of the polymer solutions used every day life employ linear chains; their behaviour is accurately captured by…
The force laws governing the extension behavior of homopolypeptides are obtained from a phenomenological free energy capable of describing the helix-coil transition. Just above the melting temperature of the free chains, T*, the plot of…
The folding of a polypeptide is an example of the cooperative effects of the amino-acid residues. Of recent interest is how a secondary structure, such as a helix, spontaneously forms during the collapse of a peptide from an initial…
Protein-peptide interactions play essential functional roles in living organisms and their structural characterization is a hot subject of current experimental and theoretical research. Computational modeling of the structure of…
The formation of colloidal gels is strongly dependent on the volume fraction of the system and the strength of the interactions between the colloids. Here we explore very dilute solutions by the means of numerical simulations, and show…
By taking into account base-base stacking interactions we improve the Generalized Model of Polypeptide Chain (GMPC). Based on a one-dimensional Potts-like model with many-particle interactions, the GMPC describes the helix-coil transition…
Certain sequences of peptoid polymers (synthetic analogs of peptides) assemble into bilayer nanosheets via a nonequilibrium assembly pathway of adsorption, compression, and collapse at an air-water interface. As with other large-scale…
Coarse-grained (CG) models are often parametrized to reproduce one-dimensional structural correlation functions of an atomically-detailed model along the degrees of freedom governing each interaction potential. While cross correlations…
The coil-globule transition has been studied for A-B copolymer chains both by means of lattice Monte Carlo simulations using bond fluctuation algorithm and by a numerical self-consistent field method. Copolymer chains of fixed length with A…
Dynamics of various biological filaments can be understood within the framework of active polymer models. Here we consider a bead-spring model for a flexible polymer chain in which the active interaction among the beads is introduced via an…
It is well established that amyloid fibril solubility is protein specific, but how solubility depends on the interactions between the fibril building blocks is not clear. Here we use a simple protein model and perform Monte Carlo…
A reduced model, which can fold both helix and sheet structures, is proposed to study the problem of protein folding. The goal of this model is to find an unbiased effective potential that has included the effects of water and at the same…
In biology, there are several processes in which unfolded protein chains are transported along narrow-tube channels. Normally, without such a severe configurational constraint, unfolded polypeptides would not bind to each other. However,…
RNA molecules exhibit various biological functions intrinsically dependent on their diverse ecosystem of highly flexible structures. This flexibility arises from complex hydrogen-bonding networks defined by canonical and non-canonical base…
We present some recent theory and simulation results addressing the phenomena of colloidal gelation at both high and low volume fractions, in the presence of short-range attractive interactions. We discuss the ability of mode-coupling…
The conformational complexity of linear polymers far exceeds that of point-like atoms and molecules. Polymers can bend, twist, even become knotted. Thus they may also display a much richer phase structure than point particles. But it is not…
Weak interactions form the core basis of a vast number of biological processes, in particular, those involving intrinsically disordered proteins. Here, we establish a new technique capable of probing these weak interactions between…
Semiflexible polymers are widely used as a paradigm for understanding structural phases in biomolecules including folding of proteins. Here, we compare bead-spring and bead-stick variants of coarse-grained semiflexible polymer models that…
Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…
Colloidal particles with mobile binding molecules constitute a powerful platform for probing the physics of self-assembly. Binding molecules are free to diffuse and rearrange on the surface, giving rise to spontaneous control over the…