Blunt-End Driven Re-entrant Ordering in Quasi Two-Dimensional Dispersions of Spherical DNA Brushes.

ABSTRACT: We investigate the effects of crowding on the conformations and assembly of confined, highly charged, and thick polyelectrolyte brushes in the osmotic regime. Particle tracking experiments on increasingly dense suspensions of colloids coated with ultralong double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) fragments reveal nonmonotonic particle shrinking, aggregation, and re-entrant ordering. Theory and simulations show that aggregation and re-entrant ordering arise from the combined effect of shrinking, which is induced by the osmotic pressure exerted by the counterions absorbed in neighbor brushes and of a short-range attractive interaction competing with electrostatic repulsion. An unconventional mechanism gives origin to the short-range attraction: blunt-end interactions between stretched dsDNA fragments of

SUBMITTER: Romero-Sanchez I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8867906 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature