Related papers: Depletion effects and loop formation in self-avoid…
Loop formation in long molecules occurs many places in nature, from solutions of carbon nanotubes to polymers inside a cell. In this article, we review theoretical studies of the static and dynamic properties of polymer loops. For example,…
Active matter agents consume internal energy or extract energy from the environment for locomotion and force generation. Already rather generic models, such as ensembles of active Brownian particles, exhibit phenomena, which are absent at…
We investigated the Karman vortex behind a circular cylinder in a polymer solution by a molecular dynamics simulation. The vortex characteristics are distinctly different for short and long polymers. The solution with the long polymer…
We show that the exponential length distribution that is typical of actin filaments under physiological conditions dramatically narrows in the presence of (i) crosslinker proteins (ii) polyvalent counterions or (iii) depletion mediated…
We investigate conformations and dynamics of a polymer considering its monomers to be active Brownian particles. This active polymer shows very intriguing physical behavior which is absent in an active Rouse chain. The chain initially…
There are many proteins or protein complexes which have multiple DNA binding domains. This allows them to bind to multiple points on a DNA molecule (or chromatin fibre) at the same time. There are also many proteins which have been found to…
The adsorption of a single polymer to a flat surface in shear is investigated using Brownian hydrodynamics simulations and scaling arguments. Competing effects are disentangled: in the absence of hydrodynamic interactions, shear drag…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
We propose a continuum theory to model the Mullins effect, which is ubiquitously observed in polymer composites. In the theory, the softening of the materials during the stretching process is accounted for by considering the delamination of…
The depletion interaction between two parallel repulsive walls confining a dilute solution of long and flexible polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. Special attention is paid to self-avoidance between chain monomers…
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
The role of macromolecular crowding in living systems is widely appreciated, but artificial crowders used to model these effects in vitro are often inadequately characterized. In this work, we examine density, viscosity, polymer…
Recent high resolution experiments have provided a quantitative description of the statistical properties of interphase chromatin at large scales. These findings have stimulated a search for generic physical interactions that give rise to…
We analyze the interaction of two conducting, charged polymer chains in solution using a minimal model for their electronic degrees of freedom. We show that a crossing of the two chains in which the polymers pass within Angstroms of each…
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…
When two macromolecules come very near in a fluid, the surrounding molecules, having finite volume, are less likely to get in between. This leads to a pressure difference manifesting as an entropic attraction, called depletion force. Here…
Using a theoretical model we show that ideal ring polymers are stronger depletants than ideal linear polymers of equal radii of gyration, but not of equal hydrodynamic radii. The difference in the depletion-induced force profile is largely…
In this paper, we employ Molecular Dynamics computer simulations to study and compare the statics and dynamics of linear and circular (ring) polymer chains in entangled solutions of different densities. While we confirm that linear chain…
While the structure of chromatin has been studied in great detail on length scales below 30 nm, amazingly little is known about the higher-order folding motifs of chromatin in interphase. Recent experiments give evidence that the folding…
We numerically studied active Brownian particles with attractive interactions. Contrary to our intuition, the attractive force between particles disrupts the formation of a single cluster observed in motility-induced phase separation,…