Journal
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS
Volume 154, Issue 9, Pages -Publisher
AIP Publishing
DOI: 10.1063/5.0038052
Keywords
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Funding
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [NI 1487/2-1, NI 1487/2-2, NI 1487/4-2]
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Semiflexible polymers have various important roles in biological systems and materials due to their hierarchical length-scale properties. Controlling confinement can promote order but may also lead to long-ranged disruptions.
Semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in biological systems, e.g., as building blocks of the cytoskeleton, and they also play an important role in various materials due to their ability to form liquid-crystalline order. These rigid macromolecules are characterized by numerous (hierarchical) length-scales that define their static and dynamic properties. Confinement can promote uniform order, e.g., through capillary nematization in narrow slits, but it can also introduce long-ranged disruptions of the nematic ordering field through (unavoidable) topological defects in spherical containers. This Perspective concentrates on the theoretical description and computational modeling of such confined systems, with the focus on spherical containers that play an important role in the injection/ejection of double-stranded DNA from viral capsids and the fabrication of nematic droplets. Basic principles and recent developments are reviewed, followed by a discussion of open questions and potential directions for future research in this field.
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