Related papers: Viscoelastic properties of ring-linear DNA blends …
Single-filament tracing has been a valuable tool to directly determine geometrical and mechanical properties of entangled polymer networks. However, systematically verifying how the stiffness of the tracer filament or its molecular…
The rheological behavior of ring-linear polymer blends under uniaxial elongational flow has remained a subject of intense debate, particularly regarding the emergence of stress overshoot. Herein, we employ coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
We consider an elastic rod model for twisted DNA in the plectonemic regime. The molecule is treated as an impenetrable tube with an effective, adjustable radius. The model is solved analytically and we derive formulas for the contact…
Rubber blends are ubiquitous in countless technological applications. More often than not, rubber blends exhibit complex interpenetrating microstructures, which are thought to have a significant impact on their resulting macroscopic…
The viscosity of dilute and semidilute unentangled DNA solutions, in steady simple shear flow, has been measured across a range of temperatures and concentrations. For polystyrene solutions, measurements of viscosity have been carried out…
Biopolymer topology is critical for determining interactions inside cell environments, exemplified by DNA where its response to mechanical perturbation is as important as biochemical properties to its cellular roles. The dynamic structures…
We simulate entangled linear polymers in free-standing thin film geometries where the confining dimension is on the same scale or smaller than the bulk chain dimensions. We compare both film-averaged and layer-resolved, spatially…
Viscoelastic materials have non-negative relaxation spectra. This property implies that viscoelastic response functions satisfy certain necessary and sufficient conditions. It is shown that these conditions can be expressed in terms of each…
The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core particle is studied using an elastic model that incorporates anisotropy in the bending energetics and twist-bend coupling. Using the experimentally determined structure of nucleosomal DNA [T.J.…
Optical tweezers microrheology (OTM) offers a powerful approach to probe the nonlinear response of complex soft matter systems, such as networks of entangled polymers, over wide-ranging spatiotemporal scales. OTM can also uniquely…
Single-chain elasticity is of fundamental importance in polymer physics, as it underlies many of the unique properties of polymer systems. Recently, there has been interest in characterizing the elastic properties of catenanes, molecular…
Ring polymers are prevalent in natural and engineered systems, including circular bacterial DNA, crown ethers for cation chelation, and mechanical nanoswitches. The morphology and dynamics of ring polymers are governed by the chemistry and…
Molecular dynamics simulations were conducted to investigate the dynamic properties of melts of nonconcatenated ring polymers and compared to melts of linear polymers. The longest rings were composed of N=1600 monomers per chain which…
The importance of nonlinearities in material constitutive relations has long been appreciated in the continuum mechanics of macroscopic rods. Although the moment (torque) response to bending is almost universally linear for small deflection…
The strong bending of polymers is poorly understood. We propose a general quantitative framework of polymer bending that includes both the weak and strong bending regimes on the same footing, based on a single general physical principle. As…
We consider multi-chain protein native structures and propose a criterion that determines whether two chains in the system are entangled or not. The criterion is based on the behavior observed by pulling at both temini of each chain…
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…
The elastic properties of the double-stranded DNA handles used in optical tweezers experiments on biomolecules are customarily modeled by an extensible worm-like chain model. Fitting such model to experimental data however is no trivial…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we determine the linear and nonlinear viscoelastic properties of a model polymer melt in the unentangled regime. Several approaches are compared for the computation of linear moduli, including…
Recent experiments have elucidated the physical properties of kinetoplasts, which are chain-mail-like structures found in the mitochondria of trypanosome parasites formed from catenated DNA rings. Inspired by these studies, we use Monte…