IMSc Webinar

Pre-Synopsis Seminar: Confined Polymers in Biophysical Contexts

Kamal Tripathi

IMSc

A number of experimental situations involve understanding the reduction of polymer entropy due to confinement and unusual phase behaviour that can arise as a consequence. For example, DNA in living cells is a polymer confined within a nucleus and Chromatin, the term describing DNA complexed with packaging proteins in living cells, is folded and compacted on several length scales. This talk addresses aspects of the behaviour of polymers under confinement: the first concerns a novel mechanical property of the mouse embryonic stem cell nucleus exiting pluripotency, the property of auxeticity, studied using a combined biophysical and dynamical systems approach. The second describes a general computational approach to understanding confined polymers. Here, tuning both the interaction of the polymer with the walls of the confinement and the density of crowder particles provides a way of altering polymer conforma- tions within the confining region which is studied using large-scale coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations.