Seminar by Dr. Aleksander Rebane ( NYU Abu Dhabi Campus) on "Scaling Law for PEG-induced Macromolecular Crowding".

15 Oct 2025
Seminar Room # 350, second floor annex

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

Talk Title : "Scaling Law for PEG-induced Macromolecular Crowding".
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