Start
Oct 11, 2012 - 17:00
End
Oct 11, 2012 - 18:00
Venue
Room 118 (Creativity Hall) Ground Floor Chemical Engineering Department
Event Type
Speaker
Dr. Ananya Debnath Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research Ackermannweg 10 55128 Mainz Germany.
Title
Modelling of processes involving biological chain and macro molecules
Abstract: This colloquium presents our attempts at developing theoretical models and simulation methodologies to understand the dynamics of few interesting processes in condensed phase. The dynamics of polymer having different lengths crossing over a free energy barrier which is relevant to many biological processes like DNA translo- cation through membrane will be discussed. The first part of the talk deals with short chain crossing over a barrier to show the dependence of activation energy and the rate of the process on the chain length. For the case of a star polymer crossing over a barrier it crosses the barrier as a globule when it is short and as stretched state when it is long. Activation energy and the rate have an interesting dependence on the arm length of the star. Previous work on the barrier crossing of a long chain polymer shows that analytical kink solution exists in one dimension. The numerical evidence of the kink solution in one and three dimensions will be shown. The next part of the talk describes using path integral variational approach the calculation of survival probability for rate processes with dynamical disorder that is relevant to the loop closing problem of DNA replication. Both upper and lower bounds to the survival probability and a lower bound to the rate are derived. In the last part of the talk our recent progress at developing simulation methodologies for biosystems will be discussed. The functionalities of biomolecular assemblies such as membranes proteins occur on a wide variety of time and length scales. In order to comprehend the physical and chemical phenomena multiscale modeling has emerged as a highly promising simulation approach in recent years. Integrating the information from the experiments multiscale simulations and the theory can give insights into the involved physical principles related to phenomena in soft condensed matter in future.