서강대학교

초록/요약 도움말

Polymer chains in various biological and material processes are subject to repetitive cycles of packaging and ejection via small confinements. For example, a DNA is packaged into and ejected from a viral capsid during the virus replication. The ejection of the chain is often considered independent of how the chain was packaged in the first place. In this study, we perform Langevin dynamics simulations and investigate the packaging and ejection process of a semiflexible chain in a cubic confinement. We show that the ejection process should depend significantly on how the chain was packaged and that the ejection process can be categorized into three regimes: (1) knot dominant, (2) nonequilibrium conformation dominant, and (3) intermediate regimes. In case a polymer chain was packaged sufficiently slowly, the chain forms a complex knot easily such that the ejection slows down (the knot dominant regime). When the packaging occurred quickly, the knots hardly form, but the polymer chain is jammed in nonequilibrium conformational states, which slows down the ejection (nonequilibrium dominant regime). For a moderate packaging rat; the polymer chain may relax its conformation readily with a low chance of knot formation, thus leading to fast ejection (the intermediate regime).