Effect of Macromolecular Crowding on the Conformation of Confined Chain Polymers

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Summary: The conformational behavior of flexible linear chain polymers confined in cylindrical pores and slab pores has been studied, employing a hard‐bead chain model and a modification of a recently proposed recoil‐growth bias Monte Carlo methodology, which improves the sampling efficiency in confined environments. It is found that the scaling law that correlates the unconstrained component of the radius of gyration of the polymer with the pore diameter in cylindrical pores is close but neatly different than the de Gennes mean‐field value. The results also indicate that the addition of spherical particles with sizes within the protein limit may be employed to tune the folding of the confined polymer, since in this case the depletion constraints work against the effective stretching forces induced by confinement. Remarkably, the presence of the depleting particles at sufficiently high concentration leads to appreciable changes in the exponents of the conformational scaling laws with respect to the uncrowded system. Conformational behavior of flexible hard‐bead chain polymers confined in narrow pores. magnified image Conformational behavior of flexible hard‐bead chain polymers confined in narrow pores.