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The hydrodynamic effects of macromolecular crowding inside cells is often studied in vitro by using polymers as crowding reagents. Confinement of polymers inside cell-sized droplets has been shown to affect the diffusion of small molecules.…
We derive an analytical pair potential of mean force for Brownian molecules in the liquid-state. Our approach accounts for many-particle correlations of crowding particles of the liquid, and for diffusive transport across the spatially…
We study a strongly interacting crowded system of self-propelled stiff filaments by event-driven Brownian dynamics simulations and an analytical theory to elucidate the intricate interplay of crowding and self-propulsion. We find a…
Biomolecular condensates formed through the phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids are widely observed, offering a fundamental means of organizing intracellular materials in a membrane-less fashion. Traditionally, these condensates…
Diffusion of a two component fluid is studied in the framework of differential equations, but where these equations are systematically derived from a well-defined microscopic model. The model has a finite carrying capacity imposed upon it…
Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that occurs ubiquitously in nature and remains the subject of continuous research interest. Understanding diffusion is a key to understanding leaving systems. In this Chapter, I discuss diffusion of…
Macromolecular diffusion in strongly confined geometries and crowded environments is still to a large extent an open subject in soft matter physics and biology. In this paper, we employ large-scale Langevin dynamics simulations to…
Recent Molecular Dynamics simulations of glass-forming liquids revealed superdiffusive fluctuations associated with the position of a tracer particle (TP) driven by an external force. Such anomalous response, whose mechanism remains…
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) abound in cellular regulation. Their interactions are often transitory and highly sensitive to salt concentration and posttranslational modifications. However, little is known about the effect of…
Herein an alternative model to reptation to describe concentrated polymer dynamics is developed. The model assumes that the chains act as blobs that are able to diffuse past each other in a compressed state. Allowing that the local…
Macromolecular crowding can influence polymer shapes, which is important for understanding the thermodynamic stability of polymer solutions and the structure and function of biopolymers (proteins, RNA, DNA) under confinement. We explore the…
The permeability of certain polymer membranes with impenetrable nanoinclusions increases with the particle volume fraction (Merkel et al., Science, 296, 2002). This intriguing observation contradicts even qualitative expectations based on…
Droplet patterns condensing on solid substrates (breath figures) tend to evolve into a self-similar regime, characterized by a bimodal droplet size distribution. The distributions comprise a bell-shaped peak of monodisperse large droplets,…
Experimental studies of systems containing active proteins that undergo conformational changes driven by catalytic chemical reactions have shown that the diffusion coefficients of passive tracer particles and active molecules are larger…
The looping of polymers such as DNA is a fundamental process in the molecular biology of living cells, whose interior is characterised by a high degree of molecular crowding. We here investigate in detail the looping dynamics of flexible…
Gradient-driven diffusion in crowded, multicomponent mixtures is a topic of high interest because of its role in biological processes such as transport in cell membranes. In partially phase-separated solutions, gradient-driven diffusion…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
Existing energy balance models, which estimate maximum droplet spreading, insufficiently capture the droplet spreading from low to high Weber and Reynolds numbers and contact angles. This is mainly due to the simplified definition of the…
The experimental literature on the motion of mesoscopic probe particles through polymer solutions is systematically reviewed. The primary focus is the study of diffusive motion of small probe particles. Comparison is made with measurements…
Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and…