Related papers: Force-Induced Unzipping Transitions in an Athermal…
With the help of force spectroscopy, several analytical theories aim at estimating the rate coefficient of folding for various proteins. Nevertheless, a chief bottleneck lies in the fact that there is still no perfect consensus on how does…
We present an extremely simplified model of multiple-domains polymer stretching in an atomic force microscopy experiment. We portray each module as a binary set of contacts and decompose the system energy into a harmonic term (the…
In various cellular processes, biofilaments like F-actin and F-tubulin are able to exploit chemical energy associated to polymerization to perform mechanical work against an external load. The force-velocity relationship quantitatively…
Force-driven translocation of a macromolecule through a nanopore is investigated by taking into account the monomer-pore friction as well as the "crowding" of monomers on the {\it trans} - side of the membrane which counterbalance the…
The number of configurations of a polymer is reduced in the presence of a barrier or an obstacle. The resulting loss of entropy adds a repulsive component to other forces generated by interaction potentials. When the obstructions are scale…
Agglomeration, adsorption, and extraction in dispersed multiphase systems are ubiquitously encountered in biological systems, energy industry, and medical science. In this work, a novel lattice model is extended to the three-component…
We study with molecular dynamics simulations of a generic bead-spring model the cyclic crazing behaviour of glassy polymers. The aim is to elucidate the mechanical response of sole fibrillated craze matter as well as its interaction with…
Aiming at the mechanical properties of cross-linked biopolymers, we set up and analyze a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains subjected to a tensile force, with regularly spaced inter-chain bonds (cross-links) represented by harmonic…
We study the conformations of polymer chains in a poor solvent, with and without bending rigidity, by means of a simple statistical mechanics model. This model can be exactly solved for chains of length up to N=55 using exact enumeration…
Collective cell motility plays central roles in various biological phenomena such as inflammatory response, wound healing, cancer metastasis and embryogenesis. These are biological demonstrations of the unjamming transition. However,…
We consider a biopolymer bundle consisting of filaments that are crosslinked together. The crosslinks are reversible: they can dynamically bind and unbind adjacent filament pairs as controlled by a binding enthalpy. The bundle is subjected…
The looping of polymers such as DNA is a fundamental process in the molecular biology of living cells, whose interior is characterised by a high degree of molecular crowding. We here investigate in detail the looping dynamics of flexible…
We investigate how randomly oriented cell traction forces lead to fluidisation in a vertex model of epithelial tissues. We find that the fluidisation occurs at a critical value of the traction force magnitude $F_c$. We show that this…
A mesoscopic model is proposed to explain the anomalous dynamics in a supercooled liquid as its glass transition temperature is approached from above. The model is based on the assumption of $\beta$ organized $\alpha$ process, with the…
In this article we address the problem of Euler's buckling instability in a charged semi-flexible polymer that is under the action of a compressive force. We consider this instability as a phase transition and investigate the role of…
Motivated by the experiments on DNA under torsion, we consider the problem of pulling a polymer out of a potential well by a force applied to one of its ends. If the force is less than a critical value, then the process is activated and has…
We consider two complementary polymer strands of length $L$ attached by a common end monomer. The two strands bind through complementary monomers and at low temperatures form a double stranded conformation (zipping), while at high…
When non-adsorbing polymers are added to an isotropic suspension of rod-like colloids, the colloids effectively attract each other via depletion forces. We performed Monte Carlo simulations to study the phase diagram of such rod-polymer…
The stability of a $\beta$-sheeted conformation and its transition into a random coil are studied with a 2D lattice biopolymer model. At low temperature and low external force, the polymer folds back and forth on itself and forms a…
Here, we show by solution nuclear magnetic resonance measurements that the urea-unfolded protein apoazurin becomes elongated when the synthetic crowding agent dextran 20 is present, in contrast to the prediction from the macromolecular…