Related papers: Characterizing the Interplay between Polymer Solva…
The hydrophobic effect is the dominant force which drives a protein towards its native state, but its physics has not been thoroughly understood yet. We introduce an exactly solvable model of the solvation of non-polar molecules in water,…
We introduce an exactly solvable statistical-mechanical model of the hydration of non-polar compounds, based on grouping water molecules in clusters where hydrogen bonds and isotropic interactions occur; interactions between clusters are…
We have used computer simulation to study the collapse of a hydrophobic chain in water. We find that the mechanism of collapse is much like that of a first order phase transition. The evaporation of water in the vicinity of the polymer…
We present an overview of the recent progress that has been made in understanding the origin of hydrophobic interactions. We discuss the different character of the solvation behavior of apolar solutes at small and large length scales. We…
Unstructured proteins can modulate cellular responses to environmental conditions by undergoing coil-globule transitions and phase separation. However, the molecular mechanisms of these phenomena still need to be fully understood. Here, we…
Polymer behavior in mixed solvents often exhibits intriguing phenomena, such as cosolvency, where a polymer that collapses in two individually poor solvents becomes soluble in their mixture. In this study, we employ a combination of…
We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on…
We investigate numerically the dynamical behaviour of a polymer chain collapsing in a dilute solution. The rate of collapse is measured with and without the presence of hydrodynamic interactions. We find that hydrodynamic interactions both…
Active processes in living systems generate nonequilibrium forces that deform embedded passive macromolecules. To understand how such dynamics influence polymer conformation, we study a flexible passive chain in an active nematic fluid.…
Smart polymers are a modern class of polymeric materials that often exhibit unpredictable behavior in mixtures of solvents. One such phenomenon is co-non-solvency. Co-non-solvency occurs when two (perfectly) miscible and competing good…
We investigate a lattice model of polymers where the nearest-neighbour monomer-monomer interaction strengths differ according to whether the local configurations have so-called ``hydrogen-like'' formations or not. If the interaction…
Conformational phases of a semiflexible off-lattice homopolymer model near an attractive substrate are investigated by means of multicanonical computer simulations. In our polymer-substrate model, nonbonded pairs of monomers as well as…
We investigate the dynamics of the collapse of a single copolymer chain, when the solvent quality is suddenly quenched from good to poor. We employ Brownian dynamics simulations of a bead-spring chain model and incorporate fluctuating…
The collapse and swelling behavior of a generic homopolymer is studied using implicit-solvent, explicit-cosolvent Langevin dynamics computer simulations for varying interaction strengths. The systematic investigation reveals that polymer…
Configurational fluctuations of conducting polymers in solution can bring into proximity monomers which are distant from each other along the backbone. Electrons can hop between these monomers across the "bridges" so formed. We show how…
Understanding the role of self-propulsion on the conformational properties of active filamentous objects has relevance in biology. In this context, we consider a flexible bead-spring model polymer for which along with both attractive and…
We address the problem of inverse polymer swelling. This phenomenon, in which a collapsed polymer chain swells upon decreasing temperature, can be observed experimentally in so-called thermoreversible homopolymers in aqueous solution, and…
The present paper is dedicated to the 2-dimensional Interacting Partially Directed Self Avoiding Walk constrained to remain in the upper-half plan and interacting with the horizontal axis. The model has been introduced in \cite{F90} to…
The nature of the globule-coil transition of surface-confined polymers has been an issue of debate. Here this 2D collapse transition is studied through a partially directed lattice model. In the general case of polymers with positive…
By means of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations we investigate the behaviour of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), PNIPAM, in water at temperatures below and above the lower critical solution temperature (LCST), including the undercooled…