Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 19: Poster Session 1 (joint session with BP)

CPP 19.13: Poster

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 09:30–13:00, P1

Bundling of grafted, reversibly crosslinked biopolymers — •Daniel Wilkin, Richard Vink, and Annette Zippelius — Institute for Theoretical Physics, Georg-August University of Göttingen, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

In this poster, we present a Monte Carlo simulation of a system consisting of parallel aligned polymers which are grafted perpendicularly on a flat surface. The polymers are described as weakly-bending chains (persistence length much larger than the polymer length) and neighboring chains can be reversibly crosslinked (the crosslinks being modeled as harmonic springs which induces an attractive force between the polymers). Upon increasing the number of crosslinks, our simulations reveal a transition from a homogeneous state to a state where the polymers have grouped themselves into bundles. When the polymers are grafted on the surface randomly, the bundles appear to be frozen in space (i.e. once they have formed, they never dissolve). In contrast, by grafting the polymers regularly on a lattice, the resulting bundles are mobile, i.e. they form and disappear again at any spatial location on the surface.