Conveners
T2-1 Soft Matter AM-2 (DCMMP) | Matière molle AM-2 (DPMCM)
- An-Chang Shi (McMaster University)
Presentation materials
Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC) is a biomolecular “nanomachine” that controls nucleocytoplasmic transport in eukaryotic cells. The key component of the functional architecture of the NPC is the assembly of the polymer-like intrinsically disordered proteins that line its passageway and play a central role in the NPC transport mechanism. Due to paucity of experimental methods capable to directly...
We describe a simple Monte Carlo simulation method to calculate the free energy cost of localizing a single monomer of a polymer confined to a cavity for a localization site on the inside surface of the confining cavity. The method is applied to a freely-jointed hard-sphere polymer chain confined to cavities of spherical and cubic geometries. In the latter case we consider localization at both...
The liquid-liquid phase separation in biological systems has recently attracted intense interest in molecular biology, biophysics, and polymer sciences. Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), proteins that do not fold into a unique structure when isolation because of the depletion in hydrophobicity and the abundance of polar, charged, and aromatic residues, have been discovered to undergo...
We report a combined experimental, theoretical, and simulation study of the phase behavior and microstructural dynamics of concentrated binary mixtures of spherical nanocolloids with a size ratio near two and with a tunable, intrinsic short-range attraction. In the absence of the attraction, the suspensions behave as well mixed, hard-sphere liquids. For sufficiently strong attraction, the...
Living systems at the molecular scale are complex (composed of many constituents with strong and heterogeneous interactions), far from equilibrium, and subject to strong fluctuations. Energy conversion in such contexts would seem to be challenging, yet nature has evolved numerous molecular machines that efficiently, precisely, and rapidly transduce free energy between non-equilibrium...
