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Semi-flexible polymers such as cytoskeletal filaments form
long bundles, in which the filaments are essentially parallel to each other.
These bundles are stabilized, e.g., by
attractive van der Waals forces or molecular crosslinkers. The competition between
these attractive interactions and the entropy loss of the confined filaments leads to
unbinding or unbundling transitions as one increases the temperature
or decreases the concentration of the molecular crosslinkers
[1,
2],
in close analogy to the unbinding transitions of interacting membranes
[3,
4].
Thick bundles containing many filaments exhibit
different morphologies,
including kinetically trapped states consisting of several sub-bundles,
but undergo a single unbinding transition, at which all filaments become unbound
simultaneously
[2].
This transition is discontinuous in the sense that the bundle thickness jumps
at the transition but the filaments still undergo pronounced fluctuations as
revealed by the divergence of higher moments of the filament separations.
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Buckling, Bundling, and Pattern Formation: From Semi-Flexible Polymers to Assemblies of Interacting
Filaments.
J. Comput. Theor. Nanosci. 3, 1 - 14 (2006).
Discontinuous Unbinding Transitions of Filament Bundles.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 038102 (2005).
Duality mapping and unbinding transitions of semiflexible and directed polymers.
J. Phys. A: Math. Gen., 38, L155-L161, (2005) .
Unbundling and desorption of semiflexible polymers.
Europhys. Lett. 62, 285-291 (2003).
Semi-flexible polymers with attractive interactions.
Eur. Phys. J. E. 3 , 295-306 (2000).
Adhesion of membranes via anchored stickers.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 77 ,1652-1655
(1996).
Parabolic renormalization group flow for interfaces and membranes.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 62 , 704-706 (1989).
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