Related papers: Entropy-driven phase behaviour of all-DNA associat…
Polymer chains decorated with a fraction of monomers capable of forming reversible bonds form transient polymer networks that are important in soft and biological systems. If chains are flexible and the attractive monomers are all of the…
Associative polymers are a class of polymers containing attractive stickers that can reversibly bind to each other. Their fully-bonded state gives rise, in dilute conditions, to a fluid phase of so-called single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs).…
Proteins often regulate their activities via allostery - or action at a distance - in which the binding of a ligand at one binding site influences the affinity for another ligand at a distal site. Although less studied than in proteins,…
We study theoretically a model system of a transient network of microemulsion droplets connected by telechelic polymers and explain recent experimental findings. Despite the absence of any specific interactions between either the droplets…
Grafting linkers with open ends of complementary single-stranded DNA makes a flexible tool to tune interactions between colloids,which facilitates the design of complex self-assembly structures. Recently, it has been proposed to coat…
Vitrimers are a class of polymers characterized by dynamic covalent networks, where specific monomer units, which are know as stickers, form reversible crosslinks that enable network rearrangement without loss of overall connectivity. The…
We determine the phase diagram of DNA with inter- and intra-strand native-pair interactions that mimic the compaction of DNA. We show that DNA takes an overall sheet-like structure in the region where an incipient transition to a compact…
We design and synthesize unentangled associative polymers carrying unprecedented high fractions of stickers, up to eight per Kuhn segment, that can form strong pairwise hydrogen bonding of $\sim20k_BT$ without microphase separation. The…
Composites of flexible and rigid polymers are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, yet the physical principles determining their mechanical properties are far from understood. Here, we couple force spectroscopy with large-scale…
Associative polymer networks have shown a major promise in fabrication of self-healing and responsive materials. The can also serve as simple models to study more complex biological systems where transient interactions play an important…
Biomolecular condensates are cellular phase-separated droplets that usually exhibit a viscoelastic mechanical response. A behavior rationalized by modeling the complex molecules that make up a condensate as stickers and spacers, which…
While the thermodynamics of DNA hybridization is well understood, much less is known about the kinetics of this classic system. Filling this gap in our understanding has new urgency because DNA nanotechnology often depends critically on…
Entropic repulsion between DNA ring polymers under confinement is the key mechanism governing the spatial segregation of bacterial chromosomes, although it remains incompletely understood how proteins aid the process of entropic…
Cells regulate gene expression in part by forming DNA-protein condensates in the nucleus. While existing theories describe the equilibrium size and stability of such condensates, their dynamics remain less understood. Here, we use…
In equilibrium self-assembly, microscopic building blocks spontaneously self-organize into stable structures as dictated by their interaction potentials, which limits the accessible structural features to those that correspond to global…
In this Letter we study interacting systems with spontaneous discrete symmetry breaking, where the degenerate symmetry-broken states are topologically distinct gapped phases. Edge modes appear at domain walls between the two topological…
Single-chain nanoparticles (SCNP) are a new class of bio and soft-matter polymeric objects in which a fraction of the monomers are able to form equivalently intra- or inter-polymer bonds. Here we numerically show that a fully-entropic…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
We present a modelling framework, and basic model parameterization, for the study of DNA origami folding at the level of DNA domains. Our approach is explicitly kinetic and does not assume a specific folding pathway. The binding of each…
We investigate the static and dynamic properties of dendrimers diffusing through a network of linear associative polymers using coarse-grained Brownian dynamics simulations. Both dendrimers and network chains are modelled as bead-spring…