Related papers: Stretching short biopolymers by fields and forces
Random heteropolymers are a minimal description of biopolymers and can provide a theoretical framework to the investigate the formation of loops in biophysical experiments. A two--state model provides a consistent and robust way to study…
Stretched polymers with attractive interaction are studied in two and three dimensions. They are described by biased self-avoiding random walks with nearest neighbour attraction. The bias corresponds to opposite forces applied to the first…
The Euler buckling of rods is a long-studied mechanical instability, and it remains relevant to this day, as the constituent components in many biological and physical systems are linear polymers, such as microtubules or carbon nanotubes.…
The statistics of polymers advected by a turbulent flow are investigated. To limit the polymer lengths above to coil-stretch transition, a FENE-P type relaxation law is used. The turbulence is modeled by a random strain, delta-correlated in…
We consider the model for the distribution of a long homopolymer in a potential field. The typical shape of the polymer depends on the temperature parameter. We show that at a critical value of the temperature the transition occurs from a…
We present a mean-field dynamical theory for single semiflexible polymers which can precisely capture, without fitting parameters, recent fluorescence correlation spectroscopy results on single monomer kinetics of DNA strands in solution.…
The most conspicuous property of a semiflexible polymer is its persistence length, defined as the decay length of tangent correlations along its contour. Using an efficient stochastic growth algorithm to sample polymers embedded in a…
We analyse bead--spring polymers coupled to Navier--Stokes turbulence in ultra--dilute solutions at Weissenberg number \(Wi\approx 80\). The polymers do not alter the large-scale turbulent structure, but hydrodynamic interactions generate…
Polymers in nonuniform flows undergo strong deformation, which in the presence of persistent stretching can result in the coil-stretch transition. This phenomenon has been characterized by using the formalism of nonequilibrium statistical…
We study the geometry of a semiflexible polymer at finite temperatures. The writhe can be calculated from the properties of Gaussian random walks on the sphere. We calculate static and dynamic writhe correlation functions. The writhe of a…
We consider the motion of semiflexible polymers in double-well potentials. We calculate shape, energy, and effective diffusion constant of kink excitations, and in particular their dependence on the bending rigidity of the semiflexible…
We present an extremely simplified model of multiple-domains polymer stretching in an atomic force microscopy experiment. We portray each module as a binary set of contacts and decompose the system energy into a harmonic term (the…
The mechanical properties of polymer knots under stretching in a bad or good solvent are investigated by applying a given force $F$ to a point of the knot while keeping another point fixed. The Monte Carlo sampling of the polymer…
Measurements of the capillary-driven thinning and breakup of fluid filaments are widely used to extract extensional rheological properties of complex materials. For viscoelastic (e.g., polymeric) fluids, the determination of the longest…
In this paper we compare two polymer stretching experiments. The outcome of both experiments is a force-extension relation. We use a one-dimensional model to show that in general the two quantities are not equal. In certain limits, however,…
We study the dynamics of a polymer that is pulled by a constant force through a viscoelastic medium. This is a model for a polymer being pulled through a cell by an external force, or for an active biopolymer moving due to a self generated…
We consider a mean-field model of a polymer with a spherically-symmetric finitely supported potential. We describe how the typical size of the polymer depends on the two parameters: the temperature, which approaches the critical value, and…
We directly visualize single polymers with persistence lengths ranging from $\ell_p=0.05$ to 16 $\mu$m, dissolved in the nematic phase of rod-like {\it fd} virus. Polymers with sufficiently large persistence length undergo a coil-rod…
The statistical mechanics of a ribbon polymer made up of two semiflexible chains is studied using both analytical techniques and simulation. The system is found to have a crossover transition at some finite temperature, from a type of short…
While stretching of a polymer along a flat surface is hardly different from the classical Pincus problem of pulling chain ends in free space, the role of curved geometry in conformational statistics of the stretched chain is an exciting…