Speaker: Dr. Aleksander Rebane
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry,
NYU Abu Dhabi Campus
Title: "Scaling Law for PEG-induced Macromolecular Crowding".
Day and Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Time: 11.00 am.
Venue: Room no. 350, Chemistry Department
Second floor, Annex
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Hosted by Prof. Arindam Chowdhury
Abstract Macromolecular crowding profoundly shapes intracellular phase
behavior, yet the absence of a universal metric for crowding strength
limits our ability to compare and predict phase separation across different
systems. Here, we use the well-characterized bovine serum albumin
(BSA)–polyethylene glycol (PEG) system to dissect the physics of
depletion-induced phase separation under crowding. By mapping full phase
diagrams for BSA in the presence of PEG of varying molecular weights and
polydispersity, we show that the observed behavior is quantitatively
captured by Generalized Free Volume Theory (GFVT). Crucially, we identify
an entropic crowd- ing parameter — the ratio of PEG volume fraction to the
polymer-excluded volume fraction — that collapses the data across a range
of PEG sizes onto a single master curve. This scaling captures the
thermodynamics of crowding-induced LLPS independently of crowder size and
covers a broad range of proteins beyond BSA, revealing that protein
solubility under crowding is governed by the polymer's occupancy of
accessible free volume. Our findings establish a universal control
parameter for PEG-induced entropic crowding, enabling quantitative