Related papers: Depletion interactions modulate coupled folding an…
Semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems, where their intermediate rigidity gives rise to rich structural and dynamical behavior. Confinement plays a central role in these behaviors, as spatial restrictions can…
We show that the force generated by active enzyme molecules are strong enough to influence the dynamics of their surroundings under artificial crowded environments. We measured the behavior of polymer microparticles in a…
Depletion interactions are thought to significantly contribute to the organization of intracellular structures in the crowded cytosol. The strength of depletion interactions depends on physical parameters like the depletant number density…
The effect of ring stiffness and pressure on the glassy dynamics of a thermal assembly of two-dimensional ring polymers is investigated using extensive coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In all cases, dynamical slowing down is…
Scaffold proteins organize cellular processes by bringing signaling molecules into interaction, sometimes by forming large signalosomes. Several of these scaffolds are known to polymerize. Their assemblies should therefore not be understood…
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are important for biological functions. In contrast to folded proteins, molecular recognition among certain IDPs is "fuzzy" in that their binding and/or phase separation are stochastically governed…
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…
Experiments and theories have shown that when steric interactions between crowding particles and proteins are dominant, which give rise to Asakura-Oosawa depletion forces, then the stabilities of the proteins increase compared to the…
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) constitute a broad set of proteins with few uniting and many diverging properties. IDPs-and intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) interspersed between folded domains-are generally characterized as…
Extensive coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations are performed to investigate the conformational phase diagram of a neutral polymer in the presence of attractive crowders. We show that, for low crowded densities, the polymer…
We investigate the structure and dynamics of a hard colloid-star polymer mixture in the range of its arrested phase separation, where an incipient demixing transition is interfering with a nearby vitrification line, focusing on the protein…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
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…
Biomolecular condensates such as membraneless organelles, underpinned by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), are important for physiological function, with electrostatics -- among other interaction types -- being a prominent force in…
We give an overview exploring the role of kinetics in multicomponent mixtures. Compared to the most commonly studied binary (single species plus solvent) case, multicomponent fluids show a rich interplay between kinetics and thermodynamics…
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…
Polyampholyte field theory and explicit-chain molecular dynamics models of sequence-specific phase separation of a system with two intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) species indicate consistently that a substantial polymer excluded…
Gradient-driven diffusion in crowded, multicomponent mixtures is a topic of high interest because of its role in biological processes such as transport in cell membranes. In partially phase-separated solutions, gradient-driven diffusion…
We explore the emergence of nonequilibrium collective motion in disordered non-thermal active matter when persistent motion and crowding effects compete, using simulations of a two-dimensional model of size polydisperse self-propelled…
Conformations of a crowded neutral semiflexible polymer under confinement near an attractive wall are studied via coarse-grained simulations. We study the effects of the interplay of the length of the polymer, bending rigidity, and the…