Related papers: Polymer-induced microcolony compaction in early bi…
This study focused on the expansion in polydisperse granular materials owing to mechanical annealing, which involved compression and decompression. Following minor annealing, the polydisperse systems exhibited compaction as well as the…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…
The mechanism responsible for the compaction of the genomic DNA of bacteria inside a structure called the nucleoid is a longstanding but still lively debated question. Most puzzling is the fact that the nucleoid occupies only a small…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
Bacterial biofilms play a significant role in various fields that impact our daily lives, from detrimental public health hazards to beneficial applications in bioremediation, biodegradation, and wastewater treatment. However,…
Effect of molecular crowding and confinement experienced by protein in the cell during unfolding has been studied by modeling a linear polymer chain on a percolation cluster. It is known that internal structure of the cell changes in time,…
We study the dynamics of an ideal polymer chain in a crowded, viscoelastic medium and in the presence of active forces. The motion of the centre of mass and of individual monomers is calculated. On time scales that are comparable to the…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Dispersants aid the breakup of crude oil masses and increase the available interfacial surface area for bacteria to degrade insoluble hydrocarbons in the marine environment. However, this common view neglects key aspects of the microscale…
Biopolymers are vital structures for many living organisms; for a variety of bacteria, adhesion polymers play a crucial role for the initiation of colonization. Some bacteria express, on their surface, attachment organelles (pili) that…
In a process of aggregation, a finite number of particles merge irreversibly to create growing clusters. In this work, impact of particular initial conditions: monodisperse, power-law, exponential, and inspired by condensation nuclei was…
The premelting plays an important role in ice growth, but there is a significant gap in our knowledge between the atomistic premelting surface structure and the macroscopic growth mechanism. In this work, using large-scale molecular…
Bacteria populate the colon where they replicate and migrate in response to nutrient availability. Here I model the colon bacterial population as a sandpile model, the colon-pile. Sand addition mimics bacterial replication and grains…
We investigate the motion of two overlapping polymers with self-avoidance confined in a narrow 2d box. A statistical model is constructed using blob free-energy arguments. We find spontaneous segregation under the condition: $L > R_{//}$,…
We show the impact that scalar structures deformation and mixing has on the fate of plumes of waterborne contaminant transported through a chemically heterogeneous, partially adsorbing porous medium. Via pore-scale simulations, we follow…
The influence of surface constraints on the self-assembly of liquid droplets is investigated. A semi-quantitative explanation for large scale pattern formation consisting of small scale closely arranged droplets inside the large scale…
We consider a linear polymer chain in a disordered environment modeled by percolation clusters on a square lattice. The disordered environment is meant to roughly represent molecular crowding as seen in cells. The model may be viewed as the…
Bacteria invade surfaces by forming dense colonies encased in a polymer matrix. Successful settlement of founder bacteria, early microcolony development and later macroscopic spreading of these biofilms on surfaces rely on complex physical…
We consider a model mixture of hard colloidal spheres and non-adsorbing polymer chains in a theta solvent. The polymer component is modelled as a polydisperse mixture of effective spheres, mutually noninteracting but excluded from the…
Size polydispersity in colloidal particles can disrupt order in their self-assembly, ultimately leading to a complete suppression of crystallization. In contrast to various computational studies, few experimental studies systematically…