Related papers: Molecular elasticity and the geometric phase
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
We develop an energetic model that captures the twisting behavior of spindle-shaped polymer microparticles with nematic ordering, which display remarkably different twisting behavior to ordinary nematics confined to spindles. We have…
It is well-established that many physical properties of DNA at sufficiently long length scales can be understood by means of simple polymer models. One of the most widely used elasticity models for DNA is the twistable worm-like chain…
This work introduces a methodology for the statistical mechanical analysis of polymeric chains under tension controlled by optical or magnetic tweezers at thermal equilibrium with an embedding fluid medium. The response of single bonds…
It has become clear in recent years that the simple uniform wormlike chain model needs to be modified in order to account for more complex behavior which has been observed experimentally in some important biopolymers. For example, the large…
In this work we study the assisted translocation of a polymer across a membrane nanopore, inside which a molecular motor exerts a force fuelled by the hydrolysis of ATP molecules. In our model the motor switches to its active state for a…
We study numerically the mechanical stability and elasticity properties of duplex DNA molecules within the frame of a network model incorporating microscopic degrees of freedom related with the arrangement of the base pairs. We pay special…
In this letter, we investigate the geometrically tailorable elasticity in the twisting behavior of biomimetic scale-covered slender soft substrate. Motivated by our qualitative experiments showing a significant torsional rigidity increase,…
We consider a disk-shaped thin elastic sheet bonded to a compliant sphere. (Our sheet can slip along the sphere; the bonding controls only its normal displacement.) If the bonding is stiff (but not too stiff), the geometry of the sphere…
Loops undergoing thermal fluctuations are prevalent in nature. Ring-like or cross-linked polymers, cyclic macromolecules, and protein-mediated DNA loops all belong to this category. Stability of these molecules are generally described in…
The entropy of a polymer confined in a curved surface and the elastic free energy of a membrane consisting of polymers are obtained by scaling analysis. It is found that the elastic free energy of the membrane has the form of the in-plane…
We consider the lattice model for an ideal-linear polymer chain to mimic the conformations of the semi-flexible homo-polymer chain. The polymer chain is assumed to confine in the fairly small area, such that the flexible chain conformations…
We analyze equilibrium properties and adsorption desorption phase transition behaviour of a linear semiflexible copolymer chain under constrained geometrical situation on square lattice in a good solvent. One dimensional stair shaped line…
The relation between force and stretch in the worm-like chain model of entropic elasticity is examined. Although no closed-form expression is valid for all values of forcing, solutions in the form of asymptotic series can be obtained under…
A quantitative theory of the buckling of a worm like chain based on a semi-classical approximation of the partition function is presented. The contribution of thermal fluctuations to the force-extension relation that allows to go beyond the…
Aiming at the mechanical properties of cross-linked biopolymers, we set up and analyze a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains subjected to a tensile force, with regularly spaced inter-chain bonds (cross-links) represented by harmonic…
We consider an elastic rod model for twisted DNA in the plectonemic regime. The molecule is treated as an impenetrable tube with an effective, adjustable radius. The model is solved analytically and we derive formulas for the contact…
Helical molecules change their twist number under the effect of a mechanical load. We study the twist-stretch relation for a set of short DNA molecules modeled by a mesoscopic Hamiltonian. Finite temperature path integral techniques are…
Semiflexible polymers in poor solvents exhibit a rich variety of collapsed morphologies, including globules, toroids, and rodlike bundles, arising from the competition between attractive interactions and chain stiffness. Computer…
We develop further a statistical model coupling denaturation and chain conformations in DNA (Palmeri J, Manghi M and Destainville N 2007 Phys. Rev. Lett. 99 088103). Our Discrete Helical Wormlike Chain model takes explicitly into account…