Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 39: The Collapsed State of Polymers: From Physical Concepts to Applications and Biological Systems (accompanying session, joint CPP/BP/DY)

BP 39.3: Talk

Thursday, April 3, 2014, 15:30–15:45, ZEU 250

Fractal globule as an artificial molecular machine — •Nechaev Sergei — LPTMS (Orsay, France)

The relaxation of an elastic network, constructed by a contact map of a fractal (crumpled) polymer globule is investigated. We found that: i) the slowest mode of the network is separated from the rest of the spectrum by a wide gap, and ii) the network quickly relaxes to a low-dimensional (one-dimensional, in our demonstration) manifold spanned by slowest degrees of freedom with a large basin of attraction, and then slowly approaches the equilibrium not escaping this manifold. By these dynamic properties, the fractal globule elastic network is similar to real biological molecular machines, like myosin. We have demonstrated that unfolding of a fractal globule can be described as a cascade of equilibrium phase transitions in a hierarchical system. Unfolding manifests itself in a sequential loss of stability of hierarchical levels with the temperature change.