123rd General Meeting of the KCS

Type Oral Presentation
Area Oral Presentation for Young Physical Chemists II
Room No. Room 305+306
Time THU 10:40-10:49
Code PHYS2.O-5
Subject Non-equilibrium Conformation of a Polymer Chain during Packaging and its Effect on the Packaging Rate
Authors Seulki Kwon, Bong June Sung*
Department of Chemistry, Sogang University, Korea
Abstract The conformational relaxation of a polymer chain often slows down in biological and engineering processes. The polymer may stay in non-equilibrium states throughout the process such that one cannot invoke the local thermal equilibrium (LTE) approximation, which has been usually employed to describe various processes. In this letter, motivated by recent single-molecule experiments on DNA packaging into a viral capsid, we in- vestigate how the non-equilibrium conformations would affect the packaging of a polymer chain into small confinement. We employ a simple but generic coarse-grained model and Langevin dynamics simulations to investigate the packaging kinetics. The polymer segments (both inside and outside the confinement) stay away from equilibrium under strong external force. By imposing the simulation condition to invoke the LTE, we find that the relaxation of non-equilibrium conformations plays a critical role in regulating the packaging rate.
E-mail ksulgio7@sogang.ac.kr