Chain entropy: Spoiler or benefactor in pattern recognition?

Polyvalency: Recent developments and new opportunities for chemical engineers

“…Arranz-Plaza et al 15 studied the interaction between synthetic galactoside-functionalized polymers and XL35, and found that the polyvalent interaction required a very long time to reach equilibrium, consistent with the results of the studies described earlier. 9,14 Recent work also suggests that enhancements in potency in polyvalent systems are not governed solely by thermodynamics, and that kinetics plays a role. 16 7 for different amounts of time before adding LF and exposing cells to this mixture.…”

“…8 Muthukumar's studies of pattern recognition by polymers also illustrate the presence of rugged free energy landscapes, and the resulting delays in the approach to the global minimum of free energy. 14 Recent work suggests that these concepts are also important for polyvalent recognition in biological systems, as described later.…”

“…In this context, studies of polymers and biopolymers at interfaces -a field that chemical engineers have made immense contributions to -provide important insights into polyvalent interactions. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] The "nonspecific" adsorption of polymers onto surfaces is itself inherently polyvalent; while the strength of each interaction between segments of the polymer and the surface may only be of order kT, or a few multiples of kT, the sum of the adsorption free energy of the sequences can be large. 10 Furthermore, the probability that all segments will detach simultaneously from the surface is very low, rendering the adsorption process essentially irreversible.…”

Adsorption of polyelectrolytes on charged microscopically patterned surfaces

“…However, always one of the best ways to study these systems is computational simulations [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] . There are many biological systems which their surfaces carry patterns, as an example, proteins can bind to some significant patterns of surfaces [22][23][24] . Nowadays, it is easy to create charged nano-structured surfaces, these periodic organized surfaces are found in nanostructures, magnetic storage media and nanowires [25][26][27][28] .…”

Molecular Recognition in a Lattice Model: An Enumeration Study

“…Selectivity is a genuinely cooperative effect. The question of how it emerges in a complex system is therefore very interesting from the point of view of statistical physics, and the study of idealized models can provide insight into general principles [6][7][8][9].Previous theoretical studies have mostly considered heteropolymer adsorption in either regular [10] or random [6,8,11,12] systems. The interplay of cluster sizes on random heteropolymers and random surfaces and its influence on the adsorption thermodynamics and kinetics was studied analytically and with computer simulations [8,12,13].…”