Polymer Translocation in Crowded Environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how crowded cellular environments affect polymer translocation through membranes, revealing altered dynamics, new scaling laws, and different regimes influenced by crowding and other factors.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of crowding effects on polymer translocation, uncovering novel scaling behaviors and regimes not previously characterized.

Findings

Crowding significantly alters translocation dynamics.

New scaling laws relate translocation time to chain length.

Different regimes emerge depending on crowding and chemical potential asymmetry.

Abstract

We study the effect of the crowded nature of the cellular cytoplasm on the translocation of a polymer through a pore in a membrane. By systematically treating the entropic penalty due to crowding, we show that the translocation dynamics are significantly altered, leading to novel scaling behaviors of the translocation time in terms of chain length. We also observe new and qualitatively different translocation regimes depending upon the extent of crowding, transmembrane chemical potential asymmetry, and polymer length.