Related papers: Generating forces in confinement via polymerizatio…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of semiflexible polymers driven by motor proteins (MPs) in two-dimensional motility assays under harmonic confinement. Using a coarse-grained agent-based model that incorporates stochastic motor…
Inspired by recent experiments on chromosomal dynamics, we introduce an exactly solvable model for the interaction between a flexible polymer and a set of motor-like enzymes. The enzymes can bind and unbind to specific sites of the polymer…
We report extensive numerical simulations of different models of 2D polymer rings with internal elasticity. We monitor the dynamical behavior of the rings as a function of the packing fraction, to address the effects of particle deformation…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…
We study the dynamics of a polymer that is pulled by a constant force through a viscoelastic medium. This is a model for a polymer being pulled through a cell by an external force, or for an active biopolymer moving due to a self generated…
A self-interacting polymer with one end attached to a sticky surface has been studied by means of a flat-histogram stochastic growth algorithm known as FlatPERM. We examined the four-dimensional parameter space of the number of monomers up…
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…
In this paper, we present a 2D numerical model developed to simulate the dynamics of soft, deformable particles. To accommodate significant particle deformations, the particle surface is represented as a narrow shell composed of mass points…
Synthetic polymeric materials underpin fundamental technologies in the energy, electronics, consumer goods, and medical sectors, yet their development still suffers from prolonged design timelines. Although polymer informatics tools have…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
In the cell, protein complexes form relying on specific interactions between their monomers. Excluded volume effects due to molecular crowding would lead to correlations between molecules even without specific interactions. What is the…
We describe a computational model for studying the complexity of self-assembled structures with active molecular components. Our model captures notions of growth and movement ubiquitous in biological systems. The model is inspired by…
Microswimmers and active colloids often move in confined systems, including those involving interfaces. Such interfaces, especially at the microscale, may deform in response to the stresses of the flow created by the active particle. We…
We have studied structure formation in a confined block copolymer melt by means of dynamic density functional theory (DDFT). The confinement is two-dimensional, and the confined geometry is that of a cylindrical nanopore. Although the…
Macromolecules can gain special properties by adopting knotted conformations, but engineering knotted macromolecules is a challenging task. Here we surprisingly observed that knotting can be very effectively produced in active polymers.…
The translocation of biopolymers, such as DNA and proteins, across cellular or nuclear membranes is essential for numerous biological processes. The translocation dynamics are influenced by the properties of the polymers, such as polymer…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…