Related papers: Crowding induces entropically-driven changes to DN…
A topic of intense current investigation pursues the question how the highly crowded environment of biological cells affects the dynamic properties of passively diffusing particles. Motivated by recent experiments we report results of…
Structural changes in giant DNA induced by the addition of the flexible polymer PEG were examined by the method of single-DNA observation. In dilute DNA conditions, individual DNA assumes a compact state via a discrete coil-globule…
Microtubules are an essential physical building block of cellular systems. They are organized using specific crosslinkers, motors, and influencers of nucleation and growth. With the addition of anti-parallel crosslinkers, microtubule…
Cytoskeletal crowding plays a key role in the diffusion of DNA molecules through the cell, acting as a barrier to effective intracellular transport and conformational stability required for such processes as transfection, viral infection,…
The cytoplasm of a living cell is crowded with several macromolecules of different shapes and sizes. Molecular diffusion in such a medium becomes anomalous due to the presence of macromolecules and diffusivity is expected to decrease with…
Inspired by recent experiments on the effects of cytosolic crowders on the organization of bacterial chromosomes, we consider a "feather-boa" type model chromosome in the presence of non-additive crowders, encapsulated within a cylindrical…
Macromolecular diffusion in dense colloidal suspensions is an intriguing topic of interdisciplinary relevance in Science and Engineering. While significant efforts have been undertaken to establish the impact of crowding on the dynamics of…
The mechanism responsible for the compaction of the genomic DNA of bacteria inside a structure called the nucleoid is a longstanding but still lively debated question. Most puzzling is the fact that the nucleoid occupies only a small…
Macromolecular crowding can influence polymer shapes, which is important for understanding the thermodynamic stability of polymer solutions and the structure and function of biopolymers (proteins, RNA, DNA) under confinement. We explore the…
Genetic information is stored in a linear sequence of base-pairs; however, thermal fluctuations and complex DNA conformations such as folds and loops make it challenging to order genomic material for in vitro analysis. In this work, we…
Intracellular transport of vesicular cargos, organelles, and other macromolecules is an essential process to move large items through a crowded, and inhomogeneous cellular environment. In an effort to dissect the fundamental effects of…
Quartz nanopipettes are an important emerging class of electric single-molecule sensors for DNA, proteins, their complexes as well as other biomolecular targets. However, in comparison to other resistive pulse sensors, nanopipettes…
Macromolecular crowding plays a crucial role in modulating protein dynamics in cellular and in vitro environments. Polymeric crowders such as dextran and Ficoll are known to induce entropic forces, including depletion interactions, that…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes that bind at distal DNA sites plays a central role in many cellular processes, such as transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review the basic thermodynamic…
While the impact of crowding on the diffusive transport of molecules within a cell is widely studied in biology, it has thus far been neglected in traffic systems where bulk behavior is the main concern. Here, we study the effects of…
Crowded environments modify the diffusion of macromolecules, generally slowing their movement and inducing transient anomalous subdiffusion. The presence of obstacles also modifies the kinetics and equilibrium behavior of tracers. While…
Polymer composites are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, owing to their emergent desirable mechanical properties not attainable in single-species systems. At the same time, polymer topology has been shown to play a key role in…
Unlike their model membrane counterparts, biological membranes are richly decorated with a heterogeneous assembly of membrane proteins. These proteins are so tightly packed that their excluded area interactions can alter the free energy…
We consider a linear polymer chain in a disordered environment modeled by percolation clusters on a square lattice. The disordered environment is meant to roughly represent molecular crowding as seen in cells. The model may be viewed as the…
Polymer architecture plays critical roles in both bulk rheological properties and microscale macromolecular dynamics in entangled polymer solutions and composites. Ring polymers, in particular, have been the topic of much debate due to the…