Lim Wei Kang, Denton Alan R
Department of Physics, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58108-6050, USA.
Soft Matter. 2016 Feb 28;12(8):2247-52. doi: 10.1039/c5sm02863a.
Depletion-induced interactions between colloids in colloid-polymer mixtures depend in range and strength on size, shape, and concentration of depletants. Crowding by colloids in turn affects shapes of polymer coils, such as biopolymers in biological cells. By simulating hard-sphere colloids and random-walk polymers, modeled as fluctuating ellipsoids, we compute depletion-induced potentials and polymer shape distributions. Comparing results with exact density-functional theory calculations, molecular simulations, and experiments, we show that polymer shape fluctuations play an important role in depletion and crowding phenomena.
胶体-聚合物混合物中胶体之间的耗尽诱导相互作用在范围和强度上取决于耗尽剂的大小、形状和浓度。胶体的拥挤反过来又会影响聚合物线圈的形状，比如生物细胞中的生物聚合物。通过模拟硬球胶体和随机游走聚合物（建模为波动椭球体），我们计算了耗尽诱导势和聚合物形状分布。将结果与精确的密度泛函理论计算、分子模拟和实验进行比较，我们表明聚合物形状波动在耗尽和拥挤现象中起着重要作用。
