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Updated: May 13, 2026

Formation of Ordered Biomolecular Structures by the Self-assembly of Short Peptides
Published on: November 21, 2013
Self-assembly of a bipolar model of biomacromolecules
Wei Li1, Amitabha Chakrabarti, James D Gunton
1Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA. wel208@mrl.ucsb.edu
Abstract:
Extending recent work on a generic bipolar model proposed to study the nanochain formation of amelogenin molecules, we conduct a systematic investigation in this paper on the self-assembly of such a model via sweeping the relative parameter space. The bipolar model consists of a short-range attraction and an off-center Coulomb repulsion for the supermolecule. Through the Brownian dynamics simulation of both translational and rotational motions, we study the kinetics of the self-assembly and the structure of clusters formed within the system for various interaction settings. From the results of structure factor and cluster analysis, we find that the range of the repulsive interaction has a sensitive impact in controlling the cluster size, while the strength of the attractive interaction dominates the cluster morphology such that the greater the attraction among particles, the more elongated the cluster formed.
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