Related papers: Spontaneous formation of helical states in polymer…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study structure formation in simple model polymer chains that are subject to excluded volume and torsional interactions. The changing conformations exhibited by chains of different lengths under…
Collapse of the polymer chain upon the sharp decrease of solvent quality is studied. During collapse, any pair of polymer units appearing in a sufficiently close vicinity in space has the possibility with a certain probability to form an…
The presence of ordered structures such as helices in collapsed states of polymer chains is still an open question challenging physics and biology. In this work, we present a potential model for polymer chains with monomers that are not…
We propose a potential for wormlike polymer chains which can be used to model the low-temperature conformational structures. We successfully reproduced helix ground states up to 6.5 helical loops, using the multicanonical Monte Carlo…
Helical motifs are ubiquitious in macromolecular systems. The mechanism of spontaneous emergence of helicity is unknown, especially in cases where torsional interactions are absent. Emergence of helical order needs coordinated organization…
The formation of chain-folded structures from the melt is observed in molecular dynamics simulations resembling the lamellae of polymer crystals. Crystallization and subsequent melting temperatures are related linearly to the inverse…
Dimerization and subsequent aggregation of polymers and biopolymers often occur under nonequilibrium conditions. When the initial state of the polymer is not collapsed or the final folded native state, the dynamics of dimerization can…
We investigate numerically the dynamical behaviour of a polymer chain collapsing in a dilute solution. The rate of collapse is measured with and without the presence of hydrodynamic interactions. We find that hydrodynamic interactions both…
Generic interactions e.g. the Coulomb or other long ranged radially symmetric repulsive interactions between monomers of bead-spring model of a semi-flexible polymer induce instabilities in a initially straight polymer chain to form long…
Molecular process of crystallization from an oriented amorphous state was reproduced by molecular dynamics simulation for a realistic polyethylene model. Initial oriented amorphous state was obtained by uniaxial drawing an isotropic glassy…
Using Langevin simulations, we find that simple 'generic' bead-and-spring homopolymer chains in a sufficiently bad solvent spontaneously develop helical order during the process of collapsing from an initially stretched conformation. The…
Interest in the protein folding problem has motivated a wide range of theoretical and experimental studies of the kinetics of the collapse of flexible homopolymers. In this Paper a phenomenological model is proposed for the kinetics of the…
We use computer simulations to investigate how a catalytic reaction in a polymer sol can induce the formation of a polymer gel. To this aim we consider a solution of homopolymers in which freely-diffusing catalysts convert the originally…
We present a scaling theory describing the collapse of a homopolymer chain in poor solvent. At time t after the beginning of the collapse, the original Gaussian chain of length N is streamlined to form N/g segments of length R(t), each…
The folding of a polypeptide is an example of the cooperative effects of the amino-acid residues. Of recent interest is how a secondary structure, such as a helix, spontaneously forms during the collapse of a peptide from an initial…
We investigate the dynamics of the collapse of a single copolymer chain, when the solvent quality is suddenly quenched from good to poor. We employ Brownian dynamics simulations of a bead-spring chain model and incorporate fluctuating…
We have used computer simulation to study the collapse of a hydrophobic chain in water. We find that the mechanism of collapse is much like that of a first order phase transition. The evaporation of water in the vicinity of the polymer…
We report that a dielectric polymer chain, constrained at both ends, sharply collapses when exposed to a high electric field. The chain collapse is driven by nonlocal dipolar interactions and anisotropic polarization of monomers, a…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we examine the dynamics of a family of model polymers with varying chain length and torsional potential barriers. We focus on features of the dynamics of polymers that are seen experimentally but absent…