Dresden 2009 – scientific programme
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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 37: Biopolymers (joint session CPP/BP)
CPP 37.9: Talk
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 16:45–17:00, ZEU 114
Translocation of biopolymers through narrow and wide nanopores: a multiscale computational approach — •Maria Fyta1,5, Simone Melchionna1,2, Massimo Bernaschi3, Sauro Succi3,4, and Efthimios Kaxiras1,4 — 1Department of Physics and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA — 2INFM-SOFT, Department of Physics, Università di Roma La Sapienza, P.le A. Moro 2, 00185 Rome, Italy — 3Istituto Applicazioni Calcolo, CNR, Viale del Policlinico 137, 00161, Roma, Italy — 4Initiative in Innovative Computing, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA — 5Present address: Physics Department, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Our recently developed novel multiscale approach which concurrently couples a mesoscopic fluid solvent with molecular motion has been efficiently applied to the problem of biopolymer translocation through nanopores. We present results from thousands of numerical simulations of long biopolymers up to 8000 monomers passing through pores of various sizes. The statistical scaling behavior of the translocation process is reproduced with remarkable accuracy. Our results provide valuable insight into the cooperative aspects of biopolymer and hydrodynamic motion. The statistical and dynamical features of the translocation process are incorporated into a phenomenological model for the power law dependence of the translocation time on the biopolymer length. In the case of wide pores, there is clear evidence of folding quantization, leading to a deviation from the single-exponent power-law characterizing the single-file translocation through narrow pores.