Related papers: How did prebiotic polymers become informational fo…
The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3' - 5'$ directionality, that are invariant across…
Epigenetics is a driving force of important and ubiquitous phenomena in nature such as cell differentiation or even metamorphosis. Oppositely to its widespread role, understanding the biophysical principles that allow epigenetics to control…
A poorly understood step in the transition from a chemical to a biological world is the emergence of self-replicating molecular systems. We study how a precursor for such a replicator might arise in a hydrothermal RNA reactor, which…
The coil-globule transition of hetero-polymer chains is studied here. By means of extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations, we show that the transition is directly linked to the complexity of the chain, which depends on the number of…
We have performed parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations using a simple continuum heteropolymer model for proteins. All ten heteropolymer sequences which we have studied have shown first-order transitions at low temperature to ordered…
There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those…
Hydrophobic polyelectrolytes (HPE) can solubilize bilayer membranes, form micelles or can reversibly aggregate as a function of pH. The transitions are often remarkably sharp. We show that these cooperative transitions occur by a…
Linear polymers are represented as chains of hopping reptons and their motion is described as a stochastic process on a lattice. This admittedly crude approximation still catches essential physics of polymer motion, i.e. the universal…
Knots are abundant in globular homopolymers but rare in globular proteins. To shed new light on this long-standing conundrum, we study the influence of sequence on the formation of knots in proteins under native conditions within the…
We present results for a lattice model of bio-polymers where the type of $\beta$-sheet formation can be controlled by different types of hydrogen bonds depending on the relative orientation of close segments of the polymer. Tuning these…
We present an overview of the recent progress that has been made in understanding the origin of hydrophobic interactions. We discuss the different character of the solvation behavior of apolar solutes at small and large length scales. We…
Biological organisms often have elongated, flexible structures with some degree of chirality in their bodies or movements. In nature, these organisms frequently take advantage of self-encapsulation mechanisms that create folded…
It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…
The emergence of longer information-carrying and functional nucleotide polymers from random short strands was a major stepping stone at the dawn of life. But the formation of those polymers under temperature oscillation required some form…
We study a simple solvable model describing the genesis of monomer sequences for hetero-polymers (such as proteins), as the result of the equilibration of a slow stochastic genetic selection process which is assumed to be driven by the…
Self-assembly of proteins is a biological phenomenon which gives rise to spontaneous formation of amyloid fibrils or polymers. The starting point of this phase, called nucleation exhibits an important variability among replicated…
We consider a model of two (fully) compact polymer chains, coupled through an attractive interaction. These compact chains are represented by Hamiltonian paths (HP), and the coupling favors the existence of common bonds between the chains.…
Chromatin and associated proteins constitute the highly folded structure of chromosomes. We consider a self-avoiding polymer model of the chromatin, segments of which may get cross-linked via protein binders that repel each other. The…
We discuss recent theoretical developments in the study of simple lattice models of proteins. Such models are designed to understand general features of protein structures and mechanism of folding. Among the topics covered are (i) the use…
Synthetic and biological living polymers are self-assembling chains whose chain length distributions (CLDs) are dynamic. We show these dynamics are ultrasensitive: even a small perturbation (e.g. temperature jump) non-linearly distorts the…