Related papers: Superselective adsorption of multivalent polymeric…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
Selective targeting of membranes with a specific receptor profile is an ongoing challenge in targeted drug delivery. We investigate the adsorption of copolymers on a multicomponent receptor-covered surface using grand-canonical Monte Carlo…
We utilize a multiscale modeling framework to study the effect of shape, size and ligand composition on the efficacy of binding of a ligand-coated-particle to a substrate functionalized with the target receptors. First, we show how…
We present a novel mechanism for resolving the mechanical rigidity of nanoscopic circular polymers that flow in a complex environment. The emergence of a regime of negative differential mobility induced by topological interactions between…
An important goal of self-assembly is to achieve a preprogrammed structure with high fidelity. Here, we control the valence of DNA-functionalized emulsions to make linear and branched model polymers, or `colloidomers'. The distribution of…
Selectivity of particles in a region of space can be achieved by applying external potentials to influence the particles in that region. We investigate static and dynamical properties of size selectivity in binary fluid mixtures of two…
The system of polymers in solvent mixtures is a widely-used model to represent biomolecular condensates in intracellular environments. Here, we apply a variational theory to control the center-of-mass of two polymers and perform the first…
Many biological systems fold thin sheets of lipid membrane into complex three-dimensional structures. This microscopic origami is often mediated by the adsorption and self-assembly of proteins on a membrane. As a model system to study…
Hyperuniform particle arrangements are characterized by a local number variance that grows more slowly than the volume of the observation window. We generalize this concept to describe particle systems in which particles carry weights:…
If many micelles adsorb onto the same polymer molecule then they are said to form a necklace. A minimal model of such a necklace is proposed and shown to be almost equivalent to a 1-dimensional fluid with nearest-neighbour interactions. The…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
In many biological processes highly charged biomolecules are adsorbed into oppositely charged surfaces of macroions and membranes. They form strongly correlated structures close to the surface which can not be explained by the conventional…
The interaction of amphiphilic polymers with small colloids, capable to reversibly stick onto the chains, is studied. Adhesive small colloids in solution are able to dynamically bind two polymer segments. This association leads to…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
Obtaining general relations between macroscopic properties of random assemblies, such as density, and the microscopic properties of their constituent particles, such as shape, is a foundational challenge in the study of amorphous materials.…
We consider the response of an adsorbed polymer that is pulled by an AFM within a simple geometric framework. We separately consider the cases of i) fixed polymer-surface contact point, ii) sticky case where the polymer is peeled off from…
The volume of a cyclic polytope can be obtained by forming an iterated integral along a suitable piecewise linear path running through its edges. Different choices of such a path are related by the action of a subgroup of the combinatorial…
The permeability of certain polymer membranes with impenetrable nanoinclusions increases with the particle volume fraction (Merkel et al., Science, 296, 2002). This intriguing observation contradicts even qualitative expectations based on…
Chain-like macromolecules (polymers) show characteristic adsorption properties due to their flexibility and internal degrees of freedom, when attracted to surfaces and interfaces. In this review we discuss concepts and features that are…
Here, we provide an overview of theoretical approaches to semiflexible polymers and their networks. Such semiflexible polymers have large bending rigidities that can compete with the entropic tendency of a chain to crumple up into a random…