Dynamics of highly polydisperse colloidal suspensions as a model system for bacterial cytoplasm

There are various kinds of macromolecules in bacterial cell cytoplasm. The size polydispersity of the macromolecules is so significant that the crystallization and the phase separation could be suppressed, thus stabilizing the liquid state of bacterial cytoplasm. On the other hand, recent experiments suggested that the macromolecules in bacterial cytoplasm should exhibit glassy dynamics, which should be also affected significantly by the size polydispersity of the macromolecules. In this work, we investigate the anomalous and slow dynamics of highly polydisperse colloidal suspensions, of which size distribution is chosen to mimic Escherichia coli cytoplasm. We find from our Langevin dynamics simulations that the diffusion coefficient (D-tot) and the displacement distribution functions (P(r, t)) averaged over all colloids of different sizes do not show anomalous and glassy dynamic behaviors until the system volume fraction phi is increased up to 0.82. This indicates that the intrinsic polydispersity of bacterial cytoplasm should suppress the glass transition and help maintain the liquid state of the cytoplasm. On the other hand, colloids of each kind show totally different dynamic behaviors depending on their size. The dynamics of colloids of different size becomes non-Gaussian at a different range of phi, which suggests that a multistep glass transition should occur. The largest colloids undergo the glass transition at phi = 0.65, while the glass transition does not occur for smaller colloids in our simulations even at the highest value of phi. We also investigate the distribution (P(theta, t)) of the relative angles of displacement for macromolecules and find that macromolecules undergo directionally correlated motions in a sufficiently dense system.