Optimal confinement for internal polymer binding

¹ Department of Physics, Institute of Fundamental Physics, Sejong University Seoul 143-743, South Korea
² Institut Charles Sadron (CNRS-ULP) - 67083 Strasbourg Cedex, France
³ Department of Chemical Engineering, Drexel University Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
⁴ Laboratoire Européen Associé ICS (Strasbourg, France)/MPIP (Mainz, Germany)

Received: 22 March 2005
Accepted: 10 October 2005

Abstract

Internal binding between specific groups dilute along a polymer chain plays a paramount role in many technological and biological systems. Against common intuition, we show that the interplay between excluded-volume correlations and hydrodynamic interactions can produce an optimal confinement where the binding is fastest. Similarly, there is an optimal osmotic pressure for the binding rate of a chain immersed in a solution of (non-binding) spectator chains. When internal binding leads to higher-order vertices as in self-assembly, confinement can set the same kinetic rate for the formation of several low-order vertices.