Related papers: Charge Asymmetry Suppresses Coarsening Dynamics in…
Phase separation in biomolecular mixtures can result from multiple physical interactions, which may act either complementarily or antagonistically. In the case of protein-nucleic acid mixtures, charge plays a key role but can have…
The formation of inter-polyelectrolyte complexes from the association of oppositely charged polymers in an electrolyte is studied. The charged polymers are linear oppositely charged polyelectrolytes, with possibly a neutral block. This…
Chemical activity is known to affect phase coexistence and coarsening in liquid mixtures, most commonly through reaction-induced changes of intermolecular interactions. Here, we analyze a scenario in which chemical reactions regulate…
The transport of polyelectrolytes confined by oppositely charged surfaces and driven by a constant electric field is of interest in studies of DNA separation according to size. Using molecular dynamics simulations that include surface…
Similarly-charged polyelectrolytes are known to attract each other and aggregate into bundles when the charge density of the polymers exceeds a critical value that depends on the valency of the counterions. The dynamics of aggregation of…
Dilute solutions of strongly charged polymer electrolytes undergo, upon addition of multivaltent salt to the solutions, a phase transition from extended conformations to collapsed or bundled ones. Upon further addition of salt they…
When polyelectrolyte-neutral block copolymers are mixed in aqueous solutions with oppositely charged species, stable complexes are found to form spontaneously. The mechanism is based on electrostatics, and on the compensation between the…
The addition of minute amounts of chemically inert polyacrylamide polymer to liquids results in large instabilities under steady electro-osmotic pumping through 2:1 constrictions, demonstrating that laminar flow conditions can be broken in…
Polymer electrolytes are promising candidates for the next generation lithium-ion battery technology. Large scale screening of polymer electrolytes is hindered by the significant cost of molecular dynamics (MD) simulation in amorphous…
Systems containing active components are intrinsically out of equilibrium, while binary mixtures reach their equilibrium configuration when complete phase separation is achieved. Active particles are found to stabilise non-equilibrium…
The phase separation of oppositely-charged polyelectrolytes in solution is of current interest . In this work we study the driving force for polyelectrolyte complexation using molecular dynamics simulations. We calculate the potential of…
This chapter deals with charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) in solution and at surfaces. The behavior of polyelectrolytes is markedly different from that of neutral polymers. In bulk solutions, i.e. disregarding the surface effect, there…
Polyelectrolytes under confinement are crucial for energy storage and for understanding biomolecular functions. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we analyze a polyelectrolyte solution confined between two oppositely charged planar…
We report on the complexation between charged-neutral block copolymers and oppositely charged surfactants studied by small-angle neutron scattering. Two block copolymers/surfactant systems are investigated, poly(acrylic…
We discuss in this paper the phase diagram of a diblock polyampholyte solution in the limit of high ionic strength as a function of concentration and charge asymmetry. This system is shown to be very similar to solutions of so-called…
In this work we used dissipative particle dynamics simulations to study the copolymerization process in the presence of spatial heterogeneities caused by incompatibility between polymerizing monomers. The polymer sequence details as well as…
The behavior of polyelectrolytes and polyampholytes in semi-dilute solutions is investigated theoretically. Various statistical charge distributions along the polyelectrolyte chains are considered: smeared, annealed, permuted and quenched.…
When polyelectrolyte-neutral block copolymers are mixed in solutions to oppositely charged species (e.g. surfactant micelles, macromolecules, proteins etc), there is the formation of stable supermicellar aggregates combining both…
We consider the phase separation in an asymmetrically charged lipid bilayer membrane consisting of neutral and negatively charged lipids that are in contact with in/out ionic solutions having different ionic strengths. The two asymmetric…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…