Related papers: Like-charge attraction and opposite-charge decompl…
This chapter deals with charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) in solution and at surfaces. The behavior of polyelectrolytes is markedly different from that of neutral polymers. In bulk solutions, i.e. disregarding the surface effect, there…
There are many proteins or protein complexes which have multiple DNA binding domains. This allows them to bind to multiple points on a DNA molecule (or chromatin fibre) at the same time. There are also many proteins which have been found to…
Like-charge attraction, driven by ionic correlations, challenges our understanding of electrostatics both in soft and hard matter. For two charged planar surfaces confining counterions and water, we prove that even at relatively low…
In solution, DNA is a highly charged macromolecule which bears a unit of negative charge on each phosphate of its sugar-phosphate backbone. Although partially compensated by counterions adsorbed at or condensed near it, DNA still produces a…
In solution, electrically like-charged particles can experience a strong and long-ranged attraction that leads to the formation of stable, slowly reorganizing clusters. The attractive force underpinning this spontaneous organization process…
Adsorption of monovalent and multivalent cat- and anions on a deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) molecule from a salt solution is investigated by computer simulation. The ions are modelled as charged hard spheres, the DNA molecule as a point…
The structure and dynamics of negatively charged nucleic acids strongly correlate with the concentration and charge of the oppositely charged counter-ions. It is well known that the structural collapse of DNA is favored in the presence of…
We study the attractive interactions between rod-like charged polymers in solution that appear in the presence of multi-valence counterions. The counterions condensed to the rods exhibit both a strong transversal polarization and a…
We reformulate the theory of strong electrostatic coupling in order to describe an asymmetric electrolyte solution of monovalent salt ions and polyvalent counterions using field-theoretical techniques and Monte-Carlo simulations. The theory…
Electrostatics plays a key role in biomolecular assembly. Oppositely charged biomolecules, for instance, can co-assembled into functional units, such as DNA and histone proteins into nucleosomes and actin-binding protein complexes into…
During the past years we have investigated the complexation between nanocolloids and oppositely charged polymers. The nanocolloids examined were ionic surfactant micelles and inorganic oxide nanoparticles. For the polymers, we used…
While stretching of most polymer chains leads to rather featureless force-extension diagrams, some, notably DNA, exhibit non-trivial behavior with a distinct plateau region. Here we propose a unified theory that connects force-extension…
Counterion distribution around an isolated flexible polyelectrolyte in the presence of a divalent salt is evaluated using the adsorption model [M. Muthukumar, J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 120}, 9343 (2004)] that considers Bjerrum length, salt…
Ionic transport in nanopores or nanochannels is key to many cellular processes and is now being explored as a method for DNA/polymer sequencing and detection. Although apparently simple in its scope, the study of ionic dynamics in confined…
Strong short ranged positional correlations involving counterions can induce a net attractive force between negatively charged strands of DNA, and lead to the formation of ion pairs in dilute ionic solutions. But the long range of the…
We study the interaction potential between two polyions inside a colloidal suspension. It is shown that at large separation the interaction potential is purely repulsive, with the induced attractive interactions being doubly screened. For…
The interaction between polyelectrolyte and ionic surfactant is of great importance in different areas of chemistry and biology. In this paper we present a theory of polyelectrolyte ionic-surfactant solutions. The new theory successfully…
We predict the nature (attractive or repulsive) and range (exponentially screened or long-range power law) of the electrostatic interactions of oppositely charged and planar plates as a function of the salt concentration and surface charge…
Monte Carlo simulations were employed to study two charged rods confined between two unlike charged plates, all immersed in a model electrolyte. Recently, it was shown that two rods immersed in a multivalent counterion solution may show…
We explore interactions between equally charged surfaces, in the presence of simple salt and either neutral or monovalently charged polyampholytes. We consider the possibility of using these charged polymers as crude models of ion clusters.…