Berlin 2024 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 15: Poster I

CPP 15.12: Poster

Monday, March 18, 2024, 18:00–20:00, Poster C

Coarse-grained modeling of nucleic acid coacervates — •Soumen De Karmakar and Thomas Speck — Institute for Theoretical Physics IV, University of Stuttgart, Heisenbergstr. 3, Stuttgart 70569, Germany

Membraneless biomolecular condensates, consisting of several components such as multivalent proteins, RNA, and DNA, are ubiquitous in cellular environments. Recent in vitro studies demonstrate the condensation of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) [1] or RNA [2] with increasing temperature reminiscent of lower critical solution temperatures (LCST) in thermoresponsive polymers. The observed LCST suggests that entropic interaction play a significant role in addition to the conventional enthalpy dominated interactions in other biomolecular condensates. To shed more light on the possible mechanism of LCST in the single component biomolecular condensates, we employ a minimal coarse-grained model and implicitly incorporating background ions that are essential for the formation of condensates. Our numerical study exhibits phase separation in line with the experiments of ssDNA and RNA. Our results provide insight into the design of hierarchical structures composed of several components of biomolecular assemblies.

[1] Merindol et al., Nat. Nanotech. 13, 730-738 (2018). [2] Wadsworth et al., Nat. Chem. (2023), 1755-4349.

Keywords: Coacervates; Coarse-grained biopolymers; Biomolecular assemblies