Related papers: Protein crystallization in confined geometries
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…
Recent experiments have revealed that cytoplasms become glassy when their metabolism is suppressed, while they maintain fluidity in a living state. The mechanism of this active fluidization is not clear, especially for bacterial cytoplasms,…
When fluid is confined between two molecularly smooth surfaces to a few molecular diameters, it shows a large enhancement of its viscosity. From experiments it seems clear that the fluid is squeezed out layer by layer. A simple solution of…
Molecular dynamics results on water confined in a silica pore in the low hydration regime are presented. Strong layering effects are found due to the hydrophilic character of the substrate. The local properties of water are studied as…
Asymmetric patchy particle models have recently been shown to describe the crystallization of small globular proteins with near quantitative accuracy. Here, we investigate how asymmetry in patch geometry and bond energy generally impact the…
We report here a molecular dynamics simulation study on water and aqueous LiCl solutions confined in 1.6 nm cylindrical pores of silica to investigate a dynamical cross-over, observed earlier experimentally, wherein LiCl slows down confined…
The paper discusses the features of supercooled water thin film of width $d=3.97$~nm contained by the perfect graphene layers and crystallizing under external stationary electric field. It was found that the electric field applied…
The formation of biomolecular condensates inside cells often involve intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), and several of these IDPs are also capable of forming droplet-like dense assemblies on their own, through liquid-liquid phase…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
We study a colloidal suspension confined between two quasi-parallel walls as a model system for glass transitions in confined geometries. The suspension is a mixture of two particle sizes to prevent wall-induced crystallization. We use…
We present experimental evidence of the fact that lysozyme crystals, which are grown from their mother solution and exist in it, dissolve on heating above T=307 K. We argue that the anomaly in the light scattering recently observed at the…
A quantitative understanding of aggregation mechanisms leading to the formation of inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) and protein composites in aqueous media is of paramount interest for colloid chemistry. In particular, the interactions between…
Folding kinetics of a lattice model of protein is studied. It uses the Random Energy Model for the intrachain couplings and a temperature dependent free energy of solvation derived from a realistic hydration model of apolar solutes. The…
Molecular dynamic simulations were employed to study a water-like model confined between hydrophobic and hydrophilic plates. The phase behavior of this system is obtained for different distances between the plates and particle-plate…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
We carry out a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation of phospholipid vesicles with transmembrane proteins. We measure the mean and Gaussian curvatures of our protein-embedded vesicles and quantitatively show how protein clusters…
Proteins tend to bury hydrophobic residues inside their core during the folding process to provide stability to the protein structure and to prevent aggregation. Nevertheless, proteins do expose some 'sticky' hydrophobic residues to the…
Crystallography may be the gold standard of protein structure determination, but obtaining the necessary high-quality crystals is also in some ways akin to prospecting for the precious metal. The tools and models developed in soft matter…
Thin films of binary mixtures that interact through isotropic forces and directionally specific "hydrogen bonding" are considered through Monte Carlo simulations. We show, in good agreement with experiment, that the single phase of these…
The freezing transition in a classical three-dimensional system of parallel hard cubes with rounded edges is studied by computer simulation and fundamental-measure density functional theory. By switching the rounding parameter s from zero…