Related papers: Amyloid Fibril Solubility
The effect of surface roughness on the structure of liquid crystalline fluids near solid substrates is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. The liquid crystal is modelled as a fluid of soft ellipsoidal molecules and the substrate is modelled…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study structure formation in simple model polymer chains that are subject to excluded volume and torsional interactions. The changing conformations exhibited by chains of different lengths under…
For the contact of two finite portions of interacting rigid crystalline surfaces, we compute the dependence of the pinning energy barrier on the misfit angle and contact area. The resulting data are used to investigate the distribution of…
We introduce a novel coarse-grained bead-spring model for flexible polymers to systematically examine the effects of an adjusted bonded potential on the formation and stability of structural macrostates in a thermal environment. The density…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
By employing monomer-resolved computer simulations and analytical considerations based on polymer scaling theory, we analyze the conformations and interactions of multiarm star polymers strongly adsorbed on a smooth, two-dimensional plane.…
We use numerical simulations to show how a fully flexible filament binding to a deformable cylindrical surface may acquire a macroscopic persistence length and a helical conformation. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
We study the elastic properties of soft solids containing air bubbles. Contrary to standard porous materials, the softness of the matrix allows for a coupling of the matrix elasticity to surface tension forces brought in by the bubbles.…
We perform Monte Carlo simulations to study the elastic properties of the helix-coil worm-like chain model of alpha-helical polypeptides. In this model the secondary structure enters as a scalar (Ising like) variable that controls the local…
The interplay between cytoskeletal architecture and the nonlinearity of the interactions due to bucklable filaments plays a key role in modulating the cell's mechanical stability and affecting its structural rearrangements. We study a model…
We investigate the folding and forced-unbinding transitions of adsorbed semiflexible polymer chains using theory and simulations. These processes describe biologically relevant phenomena that include adhesive interactions between proteins…
Recent atomic force microscopy (AFM) can measure force curves between a probe and a sample surface in several solvents. The force curve is thought as the solvation structure in some cases, because its shape is generally oscilltive and pitch…
Soft tissues - such as ligaments and tendons - primarily consist of solid (collagen, predominantly) and liquid phases. Understanding the interaction between such components and how they change under physiological loading sets the basis for…
A minimalist simulation model for lipid bilayers is presented. Each lipid is represented by a flexible chain of beads in implicit solvent. The hydrophobic effect is mimicked through an intermolecular pair potential localized at the…
Microgels are complex macromolecules. These colloid-sized polymer networks possess internal degrees of freedom and, depending on the polymer(s) they are made of, can acquire a responsiveness to variations of the environment (temperature,…
We propose a novel method for the determination of the effective interaction potential between the amino acids of a protein. The strategy is based on the combination of a new optimization procedure and a geometrical argument, which also…
The static friction between crystalline surfaces separated by a molecularly thin layer of adsorbed molecules is calculated using molecular dynamics simulations. These molecules naturally lead to a finite static friction that is consistent…
Measurements with an atomic force microscope (AFM) offer a direct way to probe elastic properties of lipid bilayer membranes locally: provided the underlying stress-strain relation is known, material parameters such as surface tension or…
The behavior of polyampholytes near a charged planar surface is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The investigated polyampholytes are overall electrically neutral and made up of oppositely charged units (called blocks) that are…