Related papers: Viscoelasticity of model interphase chromosomes
Inspired by recent experiments on chromosomal dynamics, we introduce an exactly solvable model for the interaction between a flexible polymer and a set of motor-like enzymes. The enzymes can bind and unbind to specific sites of the polymer…
The chromosome is a key player of cell physiology, and its dynamics provides valuable information about its physical organization. In both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the short-time motion of chromosomal loci has been described as a Rouse…
Characterizing the link between small-scale chromatin structure and large-scale chromosome folding during interphase is a prerequisite for understanding transcription. Yet, this link remains poorly investigated. Here, we introduce a simple…
The eukaryotic cell nucleus harbors the DNA genome that is organized in a dynamic chromatin network and embedded in a viscous crowded fluid. This environment directly affects enzymatic reactions and target search processes that access the…
The linear viscoelastic response of flexible polymer solutions in the dilute and semidilute unentangled regimes is investigated using Brownian dynamics simulations. The relaxation modulus and dynamic moduli are computed over a wide range of…
Brownian motion and viscoelasticity of semiflexible polymers is a subject that has been studied for many years. Still, rigorous analysis has been hindered due to the difficulty in handling the constraint that polymer chains cannot be…
While the dynamics of polymer chains in equilibrium media is well understood by now, the polymer dynamics in active non-equilibrium environments can be very different. Here we study the dynamics of polymers in a viscous medium containing…
We have developed a new technique to measure viscoelasticity in soft materials such as polymer solutions, by monitoring thermal fluctuations of embedded probe particles using laser interferometry in a microscope. Interferometry allows us to…
Many active particles are embedded in environments that exhibit viscoelastic properties. An important class of such media lacks a single characteristic relaxation timescale when subjected to a time-dependent stress. Rather, the stress…
We have directly observed short-time stress propagation in viscoelastic fluids using two optically trapped particles and a fast interferometric particle-tracking technique. We have done this both by recording correlations in the thermal…
We provide a detailed study of the interplay between the different interactions which appear in the Brownian motion of a micronsized sphere immersed in a viscoelastic fluid measured with optical trapping interferometry. To explore a wide…
The diffusion of particles in complex media has gained significant interest due to its dual relevance: probing the viscoelastic properties of materials via microrheology and assessing the extent of particle displacement over time. In this…
Inspired by recent experiments, we present a phase-field model of microphase separation in an elastomer swollen with a solvent. The imbalance between the molecular scale of demixing and the mesoscopic scale beyond which elasticity operates…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
Calibration of optically trapped particles in-vivo has been complicated given the frequency dependence and spatial inhomogeneity of the cytoplasmic viscosity, and the requirement of accurate knowledge of the medium refractive index.…
We present a thermo-kinetic description of anomalous diffusion of single-particles and clusters in a viscoelastic medium in terms of a non-Markovian diffusion equation involving memory functions. The scaling behaviour of these functions is…
Recent high resolution experiments have provided a quantitative description of the statistical properties of interphase chromatin at large scales. These findings have stimulated a search for generic physical interactions that give rise to…
We have advanced our previous static theory of polymer entanglement involving an extended Cahn-Hilliard functional, to include time-dependent dynamics. We go beyond the Gaussian approximation, to the one-loop level, to compute the frequency…
Monte Carlo simulations of coarse-grained polymers provide a useful tool to deepen the understanding of conformational and statistical properties of polymers both in physical as well as in biological systems. In this study we sample compact…
Self-assembled linear structures like giant cylindrical micelles or discotic molecules in solution stacked in flexible columns are systems reminiscent of polydisperse polymer solutions.These supramolecular polymers have an equilibrium…