Effects of macromolecular crowding on the collapse of biopolymers

Abstract

Experiments show that macromolecular crowding modestly reduces the size of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) even at volume fraction ($\varphi$) similar to that in the cytosol whereas DNA undergoes a coil-to-globule transition at very small $\varphi$. We show using a combination of scaling arguments and simulations that the polymer size ${\overline{R}}_g(\varphi )$ depends on $x={\overline{R}}_g(0)/D$ where $D$ is the $\varphi$-dependent distance between the crowders. If $x\lesssim \mathcal{O}(1)$, there is only a small decrease in ${\overline{R}}_g(\varphi )$ as $\varphi$ increases. When $x\gg \mathcal{O}(1)$, a cooperative coil-to-globule transition is induced. Our theory quantitatively explains a number of experiments.

7 pages 5 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (7)

• Entropically Driven Helix Formation
• Cyclization of a Polymer: A First Passage Problem for a Non-Markovian Process
• Crowding Promotes the Switch from Hairpin to Pseudoknot Conformation in Human Telomerase RNA
• Self-Assembly in Mixtures of Polymers and Small Associating Molecules
• Binding of molecules to DNA and other semiflexible polymers
• Crowding effects on the structural transitions in a flexible helical homopolymer
• Semi-flexible chain condensation by neutral depleting agents: role of correlations between depletants

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Depletion interactions modulate coupled folding and binding in crowded environments
• Anomalous, non-Gaussian tracer diffusion in heterogeneously crowded environments
• Facilitation of polymer looping and giant polymer diffusivity in crowded solutions of active particles
• Crowding-induced Elongated Conformation of Urea-unfolded Apoazurin: Investigating the Role of Crowder Shape In Silico
• Self-subdiffusion in solutions of star-shaped crowders: non-monotonic effects of inter-particle interactions
• Configuration Dynamics of a Flexible Polymer Chain in a Bath of Chiral Active Particles
• Critical phenomena in the temperature-pressure-crowding phase diagram of a protein
• The conformational phase diagram of neutral polymers in the presence of attractive crowders
• Polymer brush-induced depletion interactions and clustering of membrane proteins
• Bacterial chromosome organization I: crucial role of release of topological constraints and molecular crowders
• Influence of Solvent Quality on Conformations of Crowded Polymers
• Gradient-driven diffusion and pattern formation in crowded mixtures
• Confined crowded polymers near attractive surfaces
• Randomness and optimality in enhanced DNA ligation with crowding effects
• Modulating internal transition kinetics in responsive macromolecules by collective crowding