A coil-globule transition of a semiflexible polymer driven by the addition of spherical particles

Abstract

The phase behaviour of a single large semiflexible polymer immersed in a suspension of spherical particles is studied. All interactions are simple excluded volume interactions and the diameter of the spherical particles is an order of magnitude larger than the diameter of the polymer. The spherical particles induce a quite long ranged depletion attraction between the segments of the polymer and this induces a continuous coil-globule transition in the polymer. This behaviour gives an indication of the condensing effect of macromolecular crowding on DNA.

12 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Phase Transitions of Single Semi-stiff Polymer Chains
• The effect of chain stiffness on the phase behaviour of isolated homopolymers
• The coil-globule transition of polymers of long rigid monomers connected by flexible spacers

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Semi-flexible chain condensation by neutral depleting agents: role of correlations between depletants
• Segregative phase separation scenario of the formation of the bacterial nucleoid
• Coarse-Grained Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Depletion-Induced Interactions for Soft Matter Systems
• Bacterial nucleoid: Interplay of DNA demixing and supercoiling
• Preferential localization of the bacterial nucleoid
• Theory of molecular crowding in Brownian hard-sphere liquids with application to the polymer coil-globule transition
• Coarse-Grained model of the demixing of DNA and non-binding globular macromolecules