Abstract
Experiments show that macromolecular crowding modestly reduces the size of intrinsically disordered proteins even at a volume fraction () similar to that in the cytosol, whereas DNA undergoes a coil-to-globule transition at very small . We show using a combination of scaling arguments and simulations that the polymer size depends on , where is the -dependent distance between the crowders. If , there is only a small decrease in as increases. When , a cooperative coil-to-globule transition is induced. Our theory quantitatively explains a number of experiments.
- Received 11 September 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.068303
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