Related papers: Direct imaging of polymer filaments pulled from re…
DNA translocation through nanopores is one of the most promising strategies for the next-generation sequencing technologies. Most part of experimental and numerical works has focused on polymer translocation biased by electrophoresis, where…
Polymer fibers consist of macromolecules oriented along the fiber axis. Better alignment of chains leads to an increased strength of the fiber. It is believed that the key factor preventing formation of a perfectly oriented fiber is…
Bundles of polymer filaments are responsible for the rich and unique mechanical behaviors of many biomaterials, including cells and extracellular matrices. In fibrin biopolymers, whose nonlinear elastic properties are crucial for normal…
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…
Trapping, linearization, and imaging of single molecule DNA is of broad interest to both biophysicists who study polymer physics and engineers who build nucleic acid analyzing methods such as optical mapping. In this study, single DNA…
When a film of a liquid suspension of nanoparticles or a polymer solution is deposited on a surface, it may dewet from the surface and as the solvent evaporates the solute particles/polymer can be deposited on the surface in regular line…
We study the segregation of motile semiflexible filaments from a background of similar but non-motile filaments. Our Langevin dynamics simulations reveal a wide range of emergent structures governed by filament flexibility and activity,…
Engineering simple, artificial models of living cells allows synthetic biologists to study cellular functions under well-controlled conditions. Reconstituting multicellular behaviors with synthetic cell-mimics is still a challenge because…
Simple expressions for the bending and the base-stacking energy of double-stranded semiflexible biopolymers (such as DNA and actin) are derived. The distribution of the folding angle between the two strands is obtained by solving a…
Elastic filaments are vital to biological, physical and engineering systems, from cilia driving fluid in the lungs to artificial swimmers and micro-robotics. Simulating slender structures requires intricate balance of elastic, body, active,…
Relatively short peptides, such as toxins and antimicrobial-peptides, are known to insert themselves into cell membranes. On the basis of simple bead-spring models for the membrane lipids, the peptide, and water, detailed processes of the…
Gaining access to the cell interior is fundamental for many applications, such as electrical recording, drug and biomolecular delivery. A very promising technique consists of culturing cells on nano/micro pillars. The tight adhesion and…
Polypeptides can self-assemble into hierarchically organized fibrils consisting of a stack of individually folded polypeptides driven together by hydrophobic interaction. Using a coarse grained model, we systematically studied this…
While stretching of most polymer chains leads to rather featureless force-extension diagrams, some, notably DNA, exhibit non-trivial behavior with a distinct plateau region. Here we propose a unified theory that connects force-extension…
DNA plays a special role in polymer science not just because of the highly selective recognition of complementary single DNA strands but also because bacteria can express DNA chains that are very long yet perfectly monodisperse. The latter…
Accurate characterization of filamentary structures in star-forming clouds is essential for understanding star formation. Traditional methods fit observed surface density profiles $\Sigma(r)$ with slope $\gamma$ and width $H$ using the…
We present a general theoretical analysis of semiflexible filaments subject to viscous drag or point forcing. These are the relevant forces in dynamic experiments designed to measure biopolymer bending moduli. By analogy with the ``Stokes…
Substrate engineering for steering cell growth is a wide and well-established area of research in the field of modern biotechnology. Here we introduce a micromachining technique to pattern an inert, transparent polymer matrix blended with a…
Mesh-like structures, such as mucus gel or cytoskeleton networks, are ubiquitous in biological systems. These intricate structures are composed of cross-linked, semi-flexible bio-filaments, crucial to numerous biological processes. In many…
Ordering nanoparticles into a desired super-structure is often crucial for their technological applications. We use molecular dynamics simulations to study the assembly of nanoparticles in a polymer brush randomly grafted to a planar…