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Collagen is the main structural and load-bearing element of various connective tissues, where it forms the extracellular matrix that supports cells. It has long been known that collagenous tissues exhibit a highly nonlinear stress-strain…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is the mechanism underlying the formation of biomolecular condensates. Disordered protein regions often drive phase separation, but molecular interactions of disordered protein regions are not well understood,…
In living cells, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), such as FUS and DDX4, undergo phase separation, forming biomolecular condensates. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate their behavior in their respective homogenous…
A general theoretical framework is developed using free energy functional methods to understand the effects of heterogeneity in the folding of a well-designed protein. Native energetic heterogeneity arising from non-uniformity in native…
Active materials with distinctive nonequilibrium properties have diverse materials science applications. Active systems are common in living matter, such as the filament network in the cell that is activated by molecular motors, and in…
The folding of the cholesterol trapping apolipoprotein A1 in aqueous solution at increasing ionic strength is studied using atomically detailed molecular dynamics simulations. We calculate various structural properties to characterize the…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Colloidal magnetic particles embedded in an elastic polymer matrix constitute a smart material called ferrogel. It responds to an applied external magnetic field by changes in elastic properties, which can be exploited for various…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
Polymers are a primary building block in many biomaterials, often interacting with anisotropic backgrounds. While previous studies have considered polymer dynamics within nematic solvents, rarely are the the effects of anisotropic viscosity…
Biomolecules are the prime information processing elements of living matter. Most of these inanimate systems are polymers that compute their structures and dynamics using as input seemingly random character strings of their sequence,…
The idea that structural disorder might be a novel mechanism of protein interaction is widespread in the Literature, although the number of statistically significant structural studies supporting this is surprisingly low. At variance with…
The complexity of the cells can be described and understood by a number of networks such as protein-protein interaction, cytoskeletal, organelle, signalling, gene transcription and metabolic networks. All these networks are highly dynamic…
The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…
Many native structures of proteins accomodate complex topological motifs such as knots, lassos, and other geometrical entanglements. How proteins can fold quickly even in the presence of such topological obstacles is a debated question in…
A kinetic model for the nucleation mechanism of protein folding is proposed. A protein is modeled as a heteropolymer consisting of hydrophobic and hydrophilic beads with equal constant bond lengths and bond angles. The total energy of the…
Numerous studies have investigated the differences and similarities between protein structures determined by solution NMR spectroscopy and those determined by x-ray crystallography. A fundamental question is whether any observed differences…
As protein folding is a NP-complete problem, artificial intelligence tools like neural networks and genetic algorithms are used to attempt to predict the 3D shape of an amino acids sequence. Underlying these attempts, it is supposed that…
Visual illusions provide a window into the mechanisms underlying visual processing, and dynamical neural circuit models offer a natural framework for proposing and testing theories of their emergence. We propose and analyze a delay-coupled…
Conformational changes drive protein function, including catalysis, allostery, and signaling. X-ray diffuse scattering from protein crystals has frequently been cited as a probe of these correlated motions, with significant potential to…