Related papers: Viscoelastic properties of ring-linear DNA blends …
Recent magnetic tweezers experiments have reported systematic deviations of the twist response of double-stranded DNA from the predictions of the twistable worm-like chain model. Here we show, by means of analytical results and computer…
Living organisms must respond to environmental changes. Generally, accurate and rapid responses are provided by simple, unidirectional networks that connect inputs with outputs. Besides accuracy and speed, biological responses should also…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
We present micro-rheological measurments of the drag force on colloids pulled through a solution of lambda-DNA (used here as a monodisperse model polymer) with an optical tweezer. The experiments show a violation of the Stokes-Einstein…
We describe the measurement of anisotropic viscoelastic moduli in complex soft materials, such as biopolymer gels, via video particle tracking microrheology of colloid tracer particles. The use of a correlation tensor to find the axes of…
In this paper, we present a theory to efficiently deal with mechanical properties of heterogeneous polymer chain in free space and the central problem is to evaluate the diffusion equation and orientation-orientation correlation function,…
In this work, we investigate the inverse problem of determining the kernel functions that best describe the mechanical behavior of a complex medium modeled by a general nonlocal viscoelastic wave equation. To this end, we minimize a…
We propose a simple phenomenological model for describing the conformational dynamics of biopolymers via the nonlinearity-induced buckling and collapse (i.e. coiling up) instabilities. Taking into account the coupling between the internal…
The interplay of topological constraints, excluded volume interactions, persistence length and dynamical entanglement length in solutions and melts of linear chains and ring polymers is investigated by means of kinetic Monte Carlo…
We study the motion of dispersed nanoprobes in entangled active-passive polymer mixtures. By comparing the two architectures of linear vs. unconcatenated and unknotted circular polymers, we demonstrate that novel, rich physics emerge. For…
Viscoelasticity plays a key role in many practical applications and in different reasearch fields, such as in seals, sliding-rolling contacts and crack propagation. In all these contexts, a proper knowledge of the viscoelastic modulus is…
We study two closely related, nonlinear models of a viscoplastic solid. These models capture essential features of plasticity over a wide range of strain rates and applied stresses. They exhibit inelastic strain relaxation and steady flow…
DNA is a flexible molecule, but the degree of its flexibility is subject to debate. The commonly-accepted persistence length of $l_p \approx 500\,$\AA\ is inconsistent with recent studies on short-chain DNA that show much greater…
We report measurements of turbulent drag reduction of two different polyelectrolyte solutions: DNA and hydrolyzed Polyacrylamide. Changing the salt concentration in the solutions allows us to change the flexibility of the polymer chains.…
The percentage and sequence of AT and GC base pairs and charges on the DNA backbone contribute significantly to the stiffness of DNA. This elastic property of DNA also changes with small interacting ligands. The single-molecule force…
The extensional rheology of polymeric liquids has been extensively examined through experiments and theoretical predictions. However, a systematic study of the extensional rheology of polymer solutions in the semidilute regime, in terms of…
Gel electrophoresis is a powerful experimental method to probe the topology of DNA and other biopolymers. While there is a large body of experimental work which allows us to accurately separate different topoisomers of a molecule, a full…
The response of a semiflexible polyelectrolyte chain to stretching in the regimes of moderate and weak screening is studied theoretically, with a special focus on DNA experiments. By using the nonlinear Poisson--Boltzmann description of…
We theoretically investigate the looping dynamics of a linear polymer immersed in a viscoelastic fluid. The dynamics of the chain is governed by a Rouse model with a fractional memory kernel recently proposed by Weber et al. (S. C. Weber,…
We investigate wrinkling of two-dimensional random and triangular semiflexible polymer networks under shear. Both types of semiflexible networks exhibit wrinkling above a small critical shear angle, which scales with an exponent of the…