Search

In biological and synthetic materials, many important processes involve charges that are present in a medium with spatially varying dielectric permittivity. To accurately understand the role of electrostatic interactions in such systems, it is important to take into account the spatial dependence of the permittivity of the medium. However, due to the ensuing theoretical and computational challenges, this inhomogeneous dielectric response of the medium is often ignored or excessively simplified. We develop a variational formulation of electrostatics to accurately investigate systems that exhibit this inhomogeneous dielectric response. Our formulation is based on a true energy functional of the polarization charge density. The defining characteristic of a true energy functional is that at its minimum it evaluates to the actual value of the energy; this is a feature not found in many commonly used electrostatic functionals. We explore in detail the charged systems that exhibit sharp discontinuous change in dielectric permittivity, and we show that for this case our functional reduces to a functional of only the surface polarization charge density. We apply this reduced functional to study model problems for which analytical solutions are well known. We demonstrate, in addition, that the functional has many properties that make it ideal for use in molecular dynamics simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilayers of amphiphiles can organize into spherical vesicles, nanotubes, planar, undulating, and helical nanoribbons, and scroll-like cochleates. These bilayer-related architectures interconvert under suitable conditions. Here, a charged, chiral amphiphile (palmitoyl-lysine, C16-K1) is used to elucidate the pathway for planar nanoribbon to cochleate transition induced by salt (NaCl) concentration. In situ small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS), atomic force and cryogenic transmission electron microscopies (AFM and cryo-TEM) tracked these transformations over angstrom to micrometer length scales. AFM reveals that the large length (L) to width (W) ratio nanoribbons (L/W > 10) convert to sheets (L/W → 1) before rolling into cochleates. A theoretical model based on electrostatic and surface energies shows that the nanoribbons convert to sheets via a first-order transition, at a critical Debye length, with 2 shallow minima of the order of thermal energy at L/W >> 1 and at L/W = 1. SAXS shows that interbilayer spacing (D) in the cochleates scales linearly with the Debye length, and ranges from 13 to 35 nm for NaCl concentrations from 100 to 5 mM. Theoretical arguments that include electrostatic and elastic energies explain the membrane rolling and the bilayer separation-Debye length relationship. These models suggest that the salt-induced ribbon to cochleate transition should be common to all charged bilayers possessing an intrinsic curvature, which in the present case originates from molecular chirality. Our studies show how electrostatic interactions can be tuned to attain and control cochleate structures, which have potential for encapsulating, and releasing macromolecules in a size-selective manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining molecular dynamics simulations and analytical arguments, we investigate the elastic properties of charged lipid bilayers. We show that electrostatic interactions between the head groups can lead to solidification of the lipid bilayer that would otherwise be in a liquid state if the charges were absent. All elastic parameters of the bilayer such as the bending rigidity κ and the two-dimensional bulk modulus λ and Young's modulus Y are found to depend on the values of the charges assigned to the lipid head groups. To extract κ and λ, we fit the molecular dynamics data to a standard elastic model for lipid bilayers. Moreover, we analytically obtain the dependence of the Young modulus Y on the relative strengths of electrostatic and van der Waals interactions in the zero temperature limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of soft matter systems at interfaces is of utmost importance in the fields of nanopatterning and self-assembly. It has been shown that lamellar and hexagonal patterns can form on interfaces, for a wide variety of systems. The asphericity of charged domains is considered here for different strengths of the electrostatics, determined by the interface media, relative to the short range van der Waals interactions between the molecular components. The phase behavior of the surface structure is explored by using molecular dynamics simulations, including some dynamical aspects of the interaction between neighboring domains, using the Lindemann criterion [F. Lindemann, Z. Phys. 11, 609 (1910)]. The charge ratio of the electrostatic components influences the shape of the domains, as well as the degree of local order in the interdomain structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stability of colloidal suspensions is crucial in a wide variety of processes, including the fabrication of photonic materials and scaffolds for biological assemblies. The ionic strength of the electrolyte that suspends charged colloids is widely used to control the physical properties of colloidal suspensions. The extensively used two-body Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) approach allows for a quantitative analysis of the effective electrostatic forces between colloidal particles. DLVO relates the ionic double layers, which enclose the particles, to their effective electrostatic repulsion. Nevertheless, the double layer is distorted at high macroion volume fractions. Therefore, DLVO cannot describe the many-body effects that arise in concentrated suspensions. We show that this problem can be largely resolved by identifying effective point charges for the macroions using cell theory. This extrapolated point charge (EPC) method assigns effective point charges in a consistent way, taking into account the excluded volume of highly charged macroions at any concentration, and thereby naturally accounting for high volume fractions in both salt-free and added-salt conditions. We provide an analytical expression for the effective pair potential and validate the EPC method by comparing molecular dynamics simulations of macroions and monovalent microions that interact via Coulombic potentials to simulations of macroions interacting via the derived EPC effective potential. The simulations reproduce the macroion-macroion spatial correlation and the virial pressure obtained with the EPC model. Our findings provide a route to relate the physical properties such as pressure in systems of screened Coulomb particles to experimental measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy storage is at present one of the foremost issues society faces. However, material challenges now serve as bottlenecks in technological progress. Lithium-ion batteries are the current gold standard to meet energy storage needs; however, they are limited owing to the inherent instability of liquid electrolytes. Block copolymers can self-assemble into nanostructures that simultaneously facilitate ion transport and provide mechanical stability. The ions themselves have a profound, yet previously unpredictable, effect on how these nanostructures assemble and thus the efficiency of ion transport. Here we demonstrate that varying the charge of a block copolymer is a powerful mechanism to predictably tune nanostructures. In particular, we demonstrate that highly asymmetric charge cohesion effects can induce the formation of nanostructures that are inaccessible to conventional uncharged block copolymers, including percolated phases desired for ion transport. This vastly expands the design space for block copolymer materials and is informative for the versatile design of battery electrolyte materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hybridization of free oligonucleotides to densely packed, oriented arrays of DNA modifying the surfaces of spherical nucleic acid (SNA)--gold nanoparticle conjugates occurs with negative cooperativity; i.e., each binding event destabilizes subsequent binding events. DNA hybridization is thus an ever-changing function of the number of strands already hybridized to the particle. Thermodynamic quantification of this behavior reveals a 3 orders of magnitude decrease in the binding constant for the capture of a free oligonucleotide by an SNA conjugate as the fraction of pre-hybridized strands increases from 0 to ~30%. Increasing the number of pre-hybridized strands imparts an increasing enthalpic penalty to hybridization that makes binding more difficult, while simultaneously decreasing the entropic penalty to hybridization, which makes binding more favorable. Hybridization of free DNA to an SNA is thus governed by both an electrostatic barrier as the SNA accumulates charge with additional binding events and an effect consistent with allostery, where hybridization at certain sites on an SNA modify the binding affinity at a distal site through conformational changes to the remaining single strands. Leveraging these insights allows for the design of conjugates that hybridize free strands with significantly higher efficiencies, some of which approach 100%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Polyelectrolyte gels are intelligent materials that undergo large reversible volume changes for a range of environmental stimuli. Although the strength of electrostatic interactions have a strong influence on the gel response, these interactions are not properly accounted in the classical mean-field theories that assume a homogeneous charge-neutral gel. Using Poisson–Boltzmann theory and theoretically informed coarse-grained simulations, we emphasize the importance of charge inhomogeneities and the associated Coulomb interactions in determining the response of gels. Our analysis reveals that nanometer-sized gels, collapsed gels, and gels in media with low salinity or high dielectric constant, have large regions of excess charge. We also observe that the addition of salt can induce collapse in swollen gels by compensating the polymer charge. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]