Related papers: Confinement-induced glassy dynamics in a model for…
In polymers melts and supercooled liquids, the glassy dynamics is characterized by the rattling of monomers or particles in the cage formed by their neighbors. Recently, a direct correlation in such systems, described by a universal scaling…
We use molecular dynamics to investigate the glass transition occurring at large volume fraction, phi, and low temperature, T, in assemblies of soft repulsive particles. We find that equilibrium dynamics in the (phi, T) plane obey a form of…
We investigate a densely packed, non-random arrangement of forty-six chromosomes (46,XY) in human nuclei. Here, we model systems-level chromosomal crosstalk by unifying intrinsic parameters (chromosomal length and number of genes) across…
Recent experiments have been able to visualise chromosome organization in fast-growing E.coli cells. However, the mechanism underlying the spatio-temporal organization remains poorly understood. We propose that the DNA adopts a specific…
We study at- and out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a single homopolymer chain at low temperature using molecular dynamics simulations. The main quantities of interest are the average root mean square displacement of the monomers below the…
We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…
Chromosomes in the nucleus assemble into hierarchies of 3D domains that, during interphase, share essential features with a knot-free condensed polymer known as the fractal globule (FG). The FG-like chromosome likely affects macromolecular…
We study a dense colloidal suspension confined between two quasiparallel glass plates as a model system for a supercooled liquid in confined geometries. We directly observe the three-dimensional Brownian motion of the colloidal particles…
A number of recent experiments have provided detailed observations of the configurations of long DNA strands under nano-to-micrometer sized confinement. We therefore revisit the problem of an excluded volume polymer chain confined between…
We study the conformations of a semiflexible chain, confined in nano-scaled spherical cavities, under two distinct processes of confinement. Radial contraction and packaging are employed as two confining procedures. The former method is…
Entropic repulsion between DNA ring polymers under confinement is the key mechanism governing the spatial segregation of bacterial chromosomes, although it remains incompletely understood how proteins aid the process of entropic…
Increasing evidence suggests that chromosome folding and genetic expression are intimately connected. For example, the co-expression of a large number of genes can benefit from their spatial co-localization in the cellular space.…
Semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems, where their intermediate rigidity gives rise to rich structural and dynamical behavior. Confinement plays a central role in these behaviors, as spatial restrictions can…
Physically confining polymers into nanoscale pores induces significant changes in their dynamics. Although different results on the effect of confinement on the dynamics of polymers have been reported, changes in the segmental mobility of…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
Understanding the influence of activity on dense amorphous assemblies is crucial for biological processes such as wound healing, embryogenesis, or cancer progression. Here, we study the effect of self-propulsion forces of amplitude $f_0$…
The mechanism and driving forces of chromosome segregation in the bacterial cell cycle of E. coli is one of the least understood events in its life cycle. Using principles of entropic repulsion between polymer loops confined in a cylinder,…
During the life cycle of bacterial cells the non-mixing of the two ring-shaped daughter genomes is an important prerequisite for the cell division process. Mimicking the environments inside highly crowded biological cells, we study the…
We study a two-dimensional, off-lattice particle model introduced to describe absorbing phase transitions in driven non-Brownian suspensions. We numerically explore the $(\phi,\epsilon)$ phase diagram, where $\phi$ is the packing fraction…
The effect of ring stiffness and pressure on the glassy dynamics of a thermal assembly of two-dimensional ring polymers is investigated using extensive coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In all cases, dynamical slowing down is…