Anomalous Conformations and Dynamics of Active Block Copolymers

Heterogeneous distribution of passive and active domains in the chromosome plays a crucial role for its dynamic organization within the cell nucleus. Motivated by that here we investigate the steady-state conformation and dynamics of a model active-block copolymer using numerical simulations. Our results show that depending on the relative arrangements of the active and passive blocks, the polymer shows an unusual swelling, even larger than the corresponding fully active polymer. On the one hand, the dynamics of the full polymer show usual enhanced diffusion and Rouse-like scaling behavior. On the other hand, individual passive and active blocks show anomalous transient super- and sub-diffusive dynamics. We characterize this anomalous dynamics in terms of the dependence of a generalized diffusion constant with the polymer length and activity strength.