Related papers: Viscoelastic properties of ring-linear DNA blends …
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
Real filaments are not perfectly homogeneous. Most of them have various materials composition and shapes making their stiffnesses not constant along the arclength. We investigate the existence of circular and helical equilibrium solutions…
The linear viscoelastic response of single semiflexible polymer chains in the infinite-dilution limit is studied using Brownian dynamics simulations of coarse-grained bead-spring chains. The springs obey the FENE-Fraenkel force law, a…
We have developed a generalized semi-analytic approach for efficiently computing cyclization and looping $J$ factors of DNA under arbitrary binding constraints. Many biological systems involving DNA-protein interactions impose precise…
The non-linear stress-strain relation for crosslinked polymer networks is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Previously we demonstrated the importance of trapped entanglements in determining the elastic and relaxational…
Magnetic elastomers are appealing materials from an application point of view: they combine the mechanical softness and deformability of polymeric substances with the addressability by external magnetic fields. In this way, mechanical…
The geometrically rigorous nonlinear analysis of elastic shells is considered in the context of finite, but small, strain theory. The research is focused on the introduction of the full shell metric and examination of its influence on the…
We demonstrate the use of multiscale polymer modelling to quantitatively predict DNA linear dichroism (LD) in shear flow. LD is the difference in absorption of light polarised along two perpendicular axes, and has long been applied to study…
The elasticity of DNA catenanes, i.e. multiply linked DNA rings, is investigated using the Gauss invariant as a minimal model for topology conservation. An effective elastic free energy as a function of the distance $R$ between segments…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
Polydispersity is inevitable in industrially produced polymers. Established theories of polymer dynamics and rheology, however, were mostly built on monodisperse linear polymers. Dynamics of polydisperse polymers is yet to be fully explored…
The equilibrium structure of a Dinucleosome is studied using an elastic model that takes into account the force and torque balance conditions. Using the proper boundary conditions, it is found that the conformational energy of the problem…
Mechanically bonded membranes of interlocked ring polymers are a significant generalization of conventional elastic sheets, where connectivity is provided by covalent bonding, and represent a promising class of topological meta-materials.…
Random packings of granular chains are presented as a model polymer system to investigate the contribution of entanglements to strain-stiffening in the absence of Brownian motion. The chain packings are sheared in triaxial compression…
Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…
Nonlinear stiffening is a ubiquitous property of major types of biopolymers that make up the extracellular matrices (ECM) including collagen, fibrin and basement membrane. Within the ECM, many types of cells such as fibroblasts and cancer…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin is dramatically altered in the presence of a flexible cross-linker such as the abundant cytoskeletal protein filamin. The basic…
The influence of decoherence and bonding on the linear conductance of single double-stranded DNA molecules is examined by fitting a phenomenological statistical model developed recently (EPJB {\bf 68}, 237 (2009)) to experimental results.…
Oriented block copolymers exhibit a buckling instability when submitted to a tensile test perpendicular to the lamellae direction. In this paper we study this behavior using a coarse grained molecular dynamics simulation approach. Coarse…
The connection between the properties of cell tissue and those of the single constituent cells remains to be elucidated. At the purely mechanical level, the degree of rigidity of different cellular components, such as the nucleus and the…