The connection between polymer collapse and the onset of jamming

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that the interiors of proteins are densely packed, reaching packing fractions that are as large as those found for static packings of individual amino-acid-shaped particles. How can the interiors of proteins take on such high packing fractions given that amino acids are connected by peptide bonds and many amino acids are hydrophobic with attractive interactions? We investigate this question by comparing the structural and mechanical properties of collapsed attractive disk-shaped bead-spring polymers to those of three reference systems: static packings of repulsive disks, of attractive disks, and of repulsive disk-shaped bead-spring polymers. We show that attractive systems quenched to temperatures below the glass transition $T\ll T_g$ and static packings of both repulsive disks and bead-spring polymers possess similar interior packing fractions. Previous studies have shown that static packings of repulsive disks are isostatic at jamming onset, i.e. the number of contacts $N_c$ matches the number of degrees of freedom, which strongly influences their mechanical properties. We find that repulsive polymers are hypostatic at jamming onset, but effectively isostatic when including quartic modes. While attractive disk and polymer packings are hyperstatic, we identify a definition for interparticle contacts for which they can also be considered as effectively isostatic. As a result, we show that the mechanical properties (e.g. scaling of the potential energy with excess contact number and low-frequency contribution to the density of vibrational modes) of weakly attractive disk and polymer packings are similar to those of $isostatic$ repulsive disk and polymer packings. Our results demonstrate that static packings generated via attractive collapse or compression of repulsive particles possess similar structural and mechanical properties.

17 pages, 16 figures, 2 appendices

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Protein folding as a jamming transition
• Compression-driven jamming in porous cohesive aggregates
• The effect of stereochemical constraints on the structural properties of folded proteins