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We present a generic coarse-grained model to describe molecular motors acting on polymer substrates, mimicking, for example, RNA polymerase on DNA or kinesin on microtubules. The polymer is modeled as a connected chain of beads; motors are represented as freely diffusing beads which, upon encountering the substrate, bind to it through a short-ranged attractive potential. When bound, motors and polymer beads experience an equal and opposite active force, directed tangential to the polymer; this leads to motion of the motors along the polymer contour. The inclusion of explicit motors differentiates our model from other recent active polymer models. We study, by means of Langevin dynamics simulations, the effect of the motor activity on both the conformational and dynamical properties of the substrate. We find that activity leads, in addition to the expected enhancement of polymer diffusion, to an effective reduction of its persistence length. We discover that this effective softening is a consequence of the emergence of double-folded branches, or hairpins, and that it can be tuned by changing the number of motors or the force they generate. Finally, we investigate the effect of the motors on the probability of knot formation. Counter-intuitively our simulations reveal that, even though at equilibrium a more flexible substrate would show an increased knotting probability, motor activity leads to a marked decrease in the occurrence of knotted conformations with respect to equilibrium.
The extraction of membrane tubes by molecular motors is known to play an important role for the transport properties of eukaryotic cells. By studying a generic class of models for the tube extraction, we discover a rich phase diagram. In particular w
The effects of compressibility on Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) are investigated by inspecting the interplay between thermodynamic and hydrodynamic non-equilibrium phenomena (TNE, HNE, respectively) via a discrete Boltzmann model (DBM). Two effec
Self-assembling, semi-flexible polymers are ubiquitous in biology and technology. However, there remain conflicting accounts of the equilibrium kinetics for such an important system. Here, by focusing on a dynamical description of a minimal model in
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular motors translocate along
We present an analysis of the impact of structural disorder on the static scattering function of f-armed star branched polymers in d dimensions. To this end, we consider the model of a star polymer immersed in a good solvent in the presence of struct