Related papers: Biopolymer Elasticity
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
The aim of the present paper is the study of the entropic elasticity of the dsDNA molecule, having a cristallographic length L of the order of 10 to 30 persistence lengths A, when it is subject to spatial obstructions. We have not tried to…
The percentage and sequence of AT and GC base pairs and charges on the DNA backbone contribute significantly to the stiffness of DNA. This elastic property of DNA also changes with small interacting ligands. The single-molecule force…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
The lifetime of protein domains and ligand-receptor complexes under force is crucial for mechanosensitive functions, while many aspects of how force affects the lifetime still remain poorly understood. Here, we report a new analytical…
We introduce a simulation strategy to consistently couple continuum biomembrane dynamics to the motion of discrete biological macromolecules residing within or on the membrane. The methodology is used to study the diffusion of integral…
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,…
Inspired by recent experiments on chromosomal dynamics, we introduce an exactly solvable model for the interaction between a flexible polymer and a set of motor-like enzymes. The enzymes can bind and unbind to specific sites of the polymer…
The importance of nonlinearities in material constitutive relations has long been appreciated in the continuum mechanics of macroscopic rods. Although the moment (torque) response to bending is almost universally linear for small deflection…
Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and…
The temperature dependence of DNA flexibility is studied in the presence of stretching and unzipping forces. Two classes of models are considered. In one case the origin of elasticity is entropic due to the polymeric correlations, and in…
In the past decades, advances in microscopy have made it possible to study the dynamics of individual biomolecules in vitro and resolve intramolecular kinetics that would otherwise be hidden in ensemble averages. More recently,…
We study the elastic behaviour of a supercoiled DNA molecule. The simplest model is that of a rod like chain, involving two elastic constants, the bending and the twist rigidities. We show that this model is singular and needs a small…
A multiscale approach is used to simulate the translocation of DNA through a nanopore. Within this scheme, the interactions of the molecule with the surrounding fluid (solvent) are explicitly taken into account. By generating polymers of…
We examine the budding of a nanoscale particle through a lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations, free energy calculations, and an elastic theory, with the aim of determining the extent to which equilibrium elasticity theory can…
The biomolecules in and around a living cell -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates -- continuously sample myriad conformational states that are thermally accessible at physiological temperatures. Simultaneously, a given…
We provide a unified theory for the high force elasticity of biopolymers solely in terms of the persistence length, $\xi_p$, and the monomer spacing, $a$. When the force $f>\fh \sim k_BT\xi_p/a^2$ the biopolymers behave as Freely Jointed…
Nonlinear stiffening is a ubiquitous property of major types of biopolymers that make up the extracellular matrices (ECM) including collagen, fibrin and basement membrane. Within the ECM, many types of cells such as fibroblasts and cancer…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. First, we introduce a new theoretical framework, reaction-diffusion system on `chemical species…