Kinetics of microribbon formation in a simplified model of amelogenin biomacromolecules

TL;DR

This study models the formation of microribbons by amelogenin molecules using Brownian dynamics, revealing how anisotropic charge interactions influence the kinetics and pathways of cluster formation.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simplified anisotropic bipolar model combining hydrophobic and charged interactions to accurately describe microribbon formation kinetics.

Findings

Anisotropic charge interactions significantly alter cluster formation pathways.

The model reproduces key features observed in experimental microribbon formation.

Both translational and rotational diffusion are crucial in the kinetics.

Abstract

We show that the kinetics of microribbon formation of amelogenin molecules is well described by a combination of translational and rotational diffusion of a simplified anisotropic bipolar model consisting of hydrophobic spherical colloid particles and a point charge located on each particle surface. The colloid particles interact via a standard depletion attraction while the point charges interact through a screened Coulomb repulsion. We study the kinetics via a Brownian dynamics simulation of both translational and rotational motions and show that the anisotropy brought in by the charge dramatically affects the kinetic pathway of cluster formation and our simple model captures the main features of the experimental observations.