Crowding-facilitated macromolecular transport in attractive micropost arrays

Abstract Our study of DNA dynamics in weakly attractive nanofabricated post arrays revealed crowding enhances polymer transport, contrary to hindered transport in repulsive medium. The coupling of DNA diffusion and adsorption to the microposts results in more frequent cross-post hopping and increase...

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Autores principales: Fan-Tso Chien, Po-Keng Lin, Wei Chien, Cheng-Hsiang Hung, Ming-Hung Yu, Chia-Fu Chou, Yeng-Long Chen
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2017
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/e435c37685c242f98bf2967f2ff6dbe2
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Sumario:Abstract Our study of DNA dynamics in weakly attractive nanofabricated post arrays revealed crowding enhances polymer transport, contrary to hindered transport in repulsive medium. The coupling of DNA diffusion and adsorption to the microposts results in more frequent cross-post hopping and increased long-term diffusivity with increased crowding density. We performed Langevin dynamics simulations and found maximum long-term diffusivity in post arrays with gap sizes comparable to the polymer radius of gyration. We found that macromolecular transport in weakly attractive post arrays is faster than in non-attractive dense medium. Furthermore, we employed hidden Markov analysis to determine the transition of macromolecular adsorption-desorption on posts and hopping between posts. The apparent free energy barriers are comparable to theoretical estimates determined from polymer conformational fluctuations.