Related papers: Soft macromolecular confinement
Incompressibility, nonlinear deformation under stress and viscoelasticity are the fingerprint of soft tissue mechanical behavior. In order to model soft tissues appropriately, we must pursue to complete these requirements. In this work we…
We develop a theoretical description of the topological disentanglement occurring when torus knots reach the ends of a semi-flexible polymer under tension. These include decays into simpler knots and total unknotting. The minimal number of…
We investigate equilibrium microstructures exhibited by diblock copolymers in confined 3D geometries. We perform Self-Consistent Field Theory (SCFT) simulations using a finite-element based computational framework (Ackerman et al. 2017),…
We use a coarse-grained molecular model to study the self-assembly process of complexes of cationic and neutral lipids with DNA molecules ("lipoplexes") - a promising nonviral carrier of DNA for gene therapy. We identify the resulting…
Soft, amorphous solids such as tissues, foams, and emulsions are composed of deformable particles. However, the effect of single-particle deformability on the collective behavior of soft solids is still poorly understood. We perform…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
This paper deals with flow-induced shape transitions of elastic capsules. The state of the art concerning both theory and experiments is briefly reviewed starting with dynamically induced small deformation of initially spherical capsules…
The efficient and controlled assembly of complex structures from macromolecular building blocks is a critical open question in both biological systems and nanoscience. Using molecular dynamics simulations we study the self-assembly of…
Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…
The shape of materials is often subject to a number of geometric constraints that limit the size of the system or fix the structure of its boundary. In soft and biological materials, however, these constraints are not always hard, but are…
The endpoint distribution and dynamics of semiflexible fibers is studied by numerical simulation. A brief overview is given over the analytical theory of flexible and semiflexible polymers. In particular, a closed expression is given for…
Confinement can have a considerable effect on the behavior of particle systems, and is therefore an effective way to discover new phenomena. A notable example is a system of identical bosons at low temperature under an external field…
We perform numerical simulations of purely repulsive soft colloidal particles interacting via a generalized elastic potential and constrained to a two-dimensional plane and to the surface of a spherical shell. For the planar case, we…
We study dynamically crowded solutions of stiff fibers deep in the semidilute regime, where the motion of a single constituent becomes increasingly confined to a narrow tube. The spatiotemporal dynamics for wave numbers resolving the motion…
The rheology of molecular brushes remains challenging to control due to the multiple length scales and relaxation processes involved and the lack of direct observation of molecular conformation during flow. We use molecular dynamics…
We show that the problem of describing the conformations of a semiflexible polymer confined to a channel can be mapped onto an exactly solvable model in the so-called extended de Gennes regime. This regime (where the polymer is neither…
Obtaining reliable estimates of the statistical properties of complex macromolecules by computer simulation is a task that requires high computational effort as well as the development of highly efficient simulation algorithms. We present…
A polymer chain tethered to a surface may be compact or extended, adsorbed or desorbed, depending on interactions with the surface and the surrounding solvent. This leads to a rich phase diagram with a variety of transitions. To investigate…
Thermal shape fluctuations of grafted microtubules were studied using high resolution particle tracking of attached fluorescent beads. First mode relaxation times were extracted from the mean square displacement in the transverse…