Adsorption of annealed branched polymers on curved surfaces

Abstract

The behavior of annealed branched polymers near adsorbing surfaces plays a fundamental role in many biological and industrial processes. Most importantly single stranded RNA in solution tends to fold up and self-bind to form a highly branched structure. Using a mean field theory, we both perturbatively and numerically examine the adsorption of branched polymers on surfaces of several different geometries in a good solvent. Independent of the geometry of the wall, we observe that as branching density increases, surface tension decreases. However, we find a coupling between the branching density and curvature in that a further lowering of surface tension occurs when the wall curves towards the polymer, but the amount of lowering of surface tension decreases when the wall curves away from the polymer. We find that for branched polymers confined into spherical cavities, most of branch-points are located in the vicinity of the interior wall and the surface tension is minimized for a critical cavity radius. For branch polymers next to sinusoidal surfaces, we find that branch-points accumulate at the valleys while end-points on the peaks.

To appear in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter

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• Viral genome structures are optimal for capsid assembly
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• Effect of the charge distribution of virus coat proteins on the length of packaged RNAs
• Self Consistent Field Theory of Virus Assembly
• Role of Genome in the Formation of Conical Retroviral Shells
• Scaling properties of RNA as a randomly branching polymer
• Entropy of self-avoiding branching polymers: mean field theory and Monte Carlo simulations
• Viral RNA as a branched polymer