Seminar by Dr. Srabanti Chaudhury, Department of Chemistry, IISER Pune on "Role of polymer-pore interactionin the non-equilibrium phenomena of driven polymer translocation"

16 May 2019
Seminar Room #350
Talk Title : "Role of polymer-pore interactionin the non-equilibrium phenomena of driven polymer translocation"
Abstract
Thephenomenonof polymer translocation involves the passage of long chain moleculesthrough nanometer sized pores. It plays an important role in many biological processes like DNA sequencing, transportof proteins throughmembranechannels, gene therapy, virus injection, etc. While a lot of advancements are made in the past two decades to understand this complex process from experimental, theoretical and numerical studies, a great deal of it still remains poorly understood. Polymer translocation in the presence of an externally applied force isinherently a non-equilibrium process due to the longrelaxation time of polymers. In this talk,I will discuss the role of polymer-pore interaction in the context of pore driven translocationwhere an electric field acts on the monomers inside the poredue to a voltage bias applied on both sides of the pore membrane. We employcoarse grainLangevin dynamics simulationsto understand the non -equilibrium aspects of this translocation process. We study the effect of polymer–pore interaction on the translocation dynamics byeither altering the strength and spatial distribution of charges at different positions of the pore orby tuning the charge decoration on the polymerand the pore byaltering the pH of the medium.The different stages of the translocation process are studied via the measurement of the translocation times and explained qualitatively by free energy calculations.