Related papers: Stacking and Hydrogen Bonding. DNA Cooperativity a…
The denaturation of the double helix is a template for fundamental biological functions such as replication and transcription involving the formation of local fluctuational openings. The denaturation transition is studied for heterogeneous…
DNA melting and hybridization is a fundamental biological process as well as a crucial step in many modern biotechnology applications. DNA confined on surfaces exhibits different behavior from that in free solutions. The system of…
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…
HCl, a 'textbook' example of a polar covalent molecule, is a well-known compound of hydrogen and chlorine. Inspired by the discovery of unexpected stable stoichiometries of sodium chlorides, we performed systematic searches for all stable…
A new lattice protein model with a four-helix bundle ground state is analyzed by a parameter-space Monte Carlo histogram technique to evaluate the effects of an extensive variety of model potentials on folding thermodynamics. Cooperative…
We explore the coupling between the helix-coil and coil-globule transitions of a helical polymer using Monte Carlo simulations. A very rich state diagram is found. Each state is characterized by a specific configuration of the chain which…
Simple expressions for the bending and the base-stacking energy of double-stranded semiflexible biopolymers (such as DNA and actin) are derived. The distribution of the folding angle between the two strands is obtained by solving a…
At present, there have been suggested two types of physical mechanism that may facilitate preferential pairing between DNA molecules, with identical or similar base pair texts, without separation of base pairs. One solely relies on base…
We have investigated thermodynamic and dynamic properties as well as the dielectric constant of water-metha\-nol model mixtures in the entire range of composition by using constant pressure molecular dynamics simulations at ambient…
Using multicanonical simulations, the authors study the effect of charged end groups on helix formation in alanine based polypeptides. They confirm earlier reports that neutral polyalanine exhibits a pronounced helix-coil transition in gas…
We investigate the crystallization of crosslinked and entangled polymers under external deformation using a coarse-grained poly(vinyl alcohol) (CG-PVA) model and molecular dynamics simulations. Following uniaxial deformation, the systems…
Thermoresponsive polymers hold both fundamental and technological importance, but the essential physics driving their intriguing behavior is not wholly understood. We introduce a lattice framework that incorporates elements of Flory-Huggins…
We investigate the addition of stiffness to the lattice model of hydrogen-bonded polymers in two and three dimensions. We find that, in contrast to polymers that interact via a homogeneous short-range interaction, the collapse transition is…
The stabilization of macromolecules is fundamental to developing biological formulations, such as vaccines and protein therapeutics. In this study, we employ coarse grained polymer models to investigate the impact of four sugars:…
We present simulation results addressing the dynamics of a colloidal system with attractive interactions close to gelation. Our interaction also has a soft, long range repulsive barrier which suppresses liquid-gas type phase separation at…
Synthetic copolymers and biopolymers, such as polypeptides and double-stranded DNA, often exhibit strong variations in bending stiffness along their contour, which can significantly impact conformational behavior at larger scales. To…
We show that the interplay between excluded volume effects, hydrophobicity, and hydrogen bonding of a tube-like representation of a polypeptide chain gives rise to free energy landscapes that exhibit a small number of metastable minima…
Polymer composites are ideal candidates for next generation biomimetic soft materials because of their exquisite bottom-up designability. However, the richness of behaviours comes at a price: the need for precise and extensive…
We propose a dynamical model depicting the interactions between DNA and a specific binding protein involving long range transmissions. The dynamics rely on the coupling between Hydrogen bonds formed between DNA and protein and between the…
Force-induced structural transitions both in relatively random and in designed single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) chains are studied theoretically. At high salt conditions, ssDNA forms compacted hairpin patterns stabilized by base-pairing and…