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The adhesive and frictional response of an AFM tip connected to a substrate through supramolecular host-guest complexes is investigated by dynamic Monte Carlo simulations. The variation of the pull-off force with the unloading rate recently…
Charge-carrier transport in a paradigmatic semicrystalline polymer semiconductor (P3HT) is important for both fundamental understanding and applications. In samples with enhanced structural disorder due to ad-hoc point defects, the mobility…
Coupling between axial and torsional degrees of freedom often modifies the conformation and expression of natural and synthetic filamentous aggregates. Recent studies on chiral single-walled carbon nanotubes and B-DNA reveal a reversal in…
Titanium alloys are widely used in aerospace, biomedical, and energy applications owing to their high specific strength, corrosion resistance, and biocompatibility. Among them, $\alpha$-titanium alloys with a hexagonal close-packed (hcp)…
We develop a model to describe the force generated by the polymerization of an array of parallel biofilaments. The filaments are assumed to be coupled only through mechanical contact with a movable barrier. We calculate the filament density…
In many organisms, cell division is driven by the constriction of a cytokinetic ring, which consists of actin filaments and crosslinking proteins. While it has long been believed that the constriction is driven by motor proteins, it has…
In this study, a two-state mechanochemical model is presented to describe the dynamic instability of microtubules (MTs) in cells. The MTs switches between two states, assembly state and disassembly state. In assembly state, the growth of…
We describe an apparatus for performing constant strain rate deformations of polymer glasses while simultaneously measuring the segmental mobility with an optical probe reorientation method. Poly(methyl methacrylate) glasses were deformed…
The mechanical response of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and polyampholyte (PA) chains is vital for understanding their biological functions and designing functional materials. We investigate the force-extension behavior of a PA…
We describe simulations of a microscopic elastic filament immersed in a fluid and subject to a uniform external force. Our method accounts for the hydrodynamic coupling between the flow generated by the filament and the friction force it…
Flexible filaments moving in viscous fluids are ubiquitous in the natural microscopic world. For example, the swimming of bacteria and spermatozoa as well as important physiological functions at organ-level, such as the cilia-induced motion…
The effect of sequence heterogeneity on polynucleotide translocation across a pore and on simple models of molecular motors such as helicases, DNA polymerase/exonuclease and RNA polymerase is studied in detail. Pore translocation of RNA or…
We investigate structural and dynamical properties of a self-propelled filament using coarse-grained Brownian dynamics simulations. A self-propulsion force is applied along the bond vectors, i.e., tangent to the filament and their locations…
Polar activity is shown here to induce a progressive local deformation of linear polymer chains, making a clear distinction between head and tail, while the overall chain conformation gets more compact. This breakdown of self-similarity,…
Single-molecule atomic force spectroscopy probes elastic properties of titin, ubiquitin and other relevant proteins. We explain bioprotein folding dynamics under both length- and force-clamp by modeling polyprotein modules as particles in a…
Strongly correlated phases in twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) typically arise as transitions from a state in which the system behaves as a normal metal. In such metallic regime, electron-electron interactions usually only play a subleading…
The dynamics of ligaments retracting under the action of surface tension occurs in a multitude of natural and industrial applications, such as inkjet printing and atomisation. We perform fully three-dimensional, two-phase direct numerical…
Both genomic stability and sustenance of day-to-day life rely on efficient and accurate readout of the genetic code. Single-molecule experiments show that transcription and replication are highly stochastic and irregular processes, with the…
Motivated by recent experiments showing the buckling of microtubules in cells, we study theoretically the mechanical response of, and force propagation along elastic filaments embedded in a non-linear elastic medium. We find that, although…
Initially straight slender elastic rods with geometrically constrained ends buckle and form stable two-dimensional shapes when compressed by bringing the ends together. It is also known that beyond a critical value of the pre-stress,…