Related papers: Force-Induced Unzipping Transitions in an Athermal…
Protein dynamics in cells may be different from that in dilute solutions in vitro since the environment in cells is highly concentrated with other macromolecules. This volume exclusion due to macromolecular crowding is predicted to affect…
We show that when a self-avoiding polymer chain is pulled off a sticky surface by force applied to the end segment, it undergoes a first-order thermodynamic phase transition albeit without phase coexistence. This unusual feature is…
We study the force-induced unfolding of a homopolymer on the three dimensional Sierpinski gasket. The polymer is subject to a contact energy between nearest neighbour sites not consecutive along the chain and to a stretching force. The…
Monte Carlo computer simulations are used to study the segregation behaviour of two polymers under cylindrical confinement. Using a multiple-histogram method, the conformational free energy, F, of the polymers was measured as a function of…
Computer simulations are used to characterize the entropic force of one or more polymers tethered to the tip of a hard conical object that interact with a nearby hard flat surface. Pruned-enriched-Rosenbluth-method (PERM) Monte Carlo…
Using coarse-grained model we have explored forced-unfolding of RNA hairpin as a function of $f_S$ and the loading rate ($r_f$). The simulations and theoretical analysis have been done without and with the handles that are explicitly…
A statistical mechanical theory is presented to predict the effects of macromolecular crowding on protein association equilibria, accounting for both excluded volume and attractive interactions between proteins and crowding molecules.…
The forces that mixtures of motorized and passive crosslinking proteins collectively generate between cytoskeletal filaments within our cells are the key drivers of active cellular mechanics. Despite their importance, a unified theory to…
We investigate theoretically the effect of polymer tension on the collective behavior of reversibly binding cross-links. For this purpose, we employ a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains aligned in parallel by a tensile force, with…
Mechanical unfolding trajectories, generated by applying constant force in optical tweezer experiments, show that RNA hairpins and the P5abc subdomain of the group I intron unfold reversibly. We use coarse-grained Go-like models for RNA…
Polymer translocation in crowded environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. We studied polymer translocation through a pore in free, one-sided (asymmetric), and two-sided (symmetric) crowded environments. Extensive…
We consider a model of self-avoiding walk on a lattice with on-site repulsion and an attraction for every vertex of the walk visited on the surface to study force-induced desorption of a linear polymer chain adsorbed on an attractive…
In order to study long chain polymers many lattice models accommodate a pulling force applied to a particular part of the chain, often a free endpoint. This is in addition to well-studied features such as energetic interaction between the…
We study the tilt dependence of the pinning-depinning transition for an interface described by the anisotropic quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation in 2+1 dimensions, where the two signs of the nonlinear terms are different from each…
We consider the properties of a self-avoiding polymer chain, adsorbed on a solid attractive substrate which is attached with one end to a pulling force. The conformational properties of such chain and its phase behavior are treated within a…
To study the compressional forces exerted by a bundle of living stiff filaments pressing on a surface, akin to the case of an actin bundle in filopodia structures, we have performed particulate Molecular Dynamics simulations of a grafted…
We study the thermodynamics of an exactly solvable model of a self-interacting partially directed self-avoiding walk (DSAW) in two dimensions, when a force is applied on one end of the chain. The critical force for the unfolding is…
Thermally actuated twisted and coiled polymer (TCP) artificial muscles exhibit exceptional specific work capacities but are limited by an inherent competition between load-bearing capacity and actuation stroke. To address this limitation,…
We suggest a theoretical description of the force-induced translocation dynamics of a polymer chain through a nanopore. Our consideration is based on the tensile (Pincus) blob picture of a pulled chain and the notion of propagating front of…
Elastically driven filaments subjected to animating compressive follower forces provide a synthetic way to mimic the oscillatory beating of active biological filaments such as eukaryotic cilia. The dynamics of such active filaments can,…