Related papers: Kinetic Selection of Template Polymer with Complex…
Stress relaxation following deformation of an entangled polymeric liquid is thought to be affected by transient reforming of chain entanglements. In this work, we use single molecule techniques to study the relaxation of individual polymers…
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
The past few years have seen many advances in our understanding of the dynamics of polymeric fluids. These include improvements on the successful reptation theory; an emerging molecular theory of semiflexible chain dynamics; and an…
This study deals with polymer looping, an important process in many chemical and biological systems. We investigate basic questions on the looping dynamics of a polymer under tension using the freely-jointed chain (FJC) model. Previous…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…
The emergence of functional oligonucleotides on early Earth required a molecular selection mechanism to screen for specific sequences with prebiotic functions. Cyclic processes such as daily temperature oscillations were ubiquitous in this…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
We study the conformation and dynamics of a single polymer chain that is pulled by a constant force applied at its one end with the other end free. Such a situation is relevant to the growing technology of manipulating individual…
The structure and function of polymers in confined environments, e.g., biopolymers in the cytoplasm of a cell, are strongly affected by macromolecular crowding. To explore the influence of solvent quality on conformations of crowded…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
We discuss simulations of a simple model for polymer blends in the framework of the Rouse model. At odds with standard predictions, large dynamic asymmetry between the two components induces strong non-exponentiality of the Rouse modes for…
The nucleation process of polyethylene under quiescent and shear flow conditions are comparatively studied with all_atom molecular dynamical simulations. At both conditions, nucleation are demonstrated to be two_step processes, which,…
Synthetic sequence-controlled polymers promise to transform polymer science by combining the chemical versatility of synthetic polymers with the precise sequence-mediated functionality of biological proteins. However, design of these…
It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study…
Ring polymers remain a major challenge to our current understanding of polymer dynamics. Experimental results are difficult to interpret because of the uncertainty in the purity and dispersity of the sample. Using both equilibrium and…
Understanding how topological constraints affect the dynamics of polymers in solution is at the basis of any polymer theory and it is particularly needed for melts of rings. These polymers fold as crumpled and space-filling objects and,…
We review models of biological evolution in which the population frequency changes deterministically with time. If the population is self-replicating, although the equations for simple prototypes can be linearised, nonlinear equations arise…
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…
The polymerization dynamics of double-stranded polymers, such as actin filaments, is investigated theoretically using simple chemical kinetic models that explicitly take into account some microscopic details of the polymer structure and the…