Phase separation of polymer-bound particles induced by loop-mediated 1D effective long-range interactions

The cellular cytoplasm is organized into compartments. Phase separation is a simple manner to create membrane-less compartments in order to confine and localize particles like proteins. In many cases these particles are bound to fluctuating polymers like DNA or RNA. We propose a general theoretical...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2018-11
Main Authors: David, G, J -C Walter, Broedersz, C P, Dorignac, J, Geniet, F, Parmeggiani, A, N -O Walliser, Palmeri, J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Compartments
Cytoplasm
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
Mean field theory
Phase diagrams
Phase separation
Phase transitions
Polymers
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Summary:The cellular cytoplasm is organized into compartments. Phase separation is a simple manner to create membrane-less compartments in order to confine and localize particles like proteins. In many cases these particles are bound to fluctuating polymers like DNA or RNA. We propose a general theoretical framework for such polymer-bound particles and derive an effective 1D lattice gas model with both nearest-neighbor and emergent long-range interactions arising from looped configurations of the fluctuating polymer. We argue that 1D phase transitions exist in such systems for both Gaussian and self-avoiding polymers and, using a variational method that goes beyond mean-field theory, we obtain the complete mean occupation-temperature phase diagram. To illustrate this model we apply it to the biologically relevant case of ParABS, a prevalent bacterial DNA segregation system.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1811.09234