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Abstract:

Enzymes are nano-scale machines that have evolved to drive chemical reactions out of equilibrium in the right place at the right time. Given the complexity and specificity of enzymatic function, the bottom-up design of enzymes presents a daunting task that is far more challenging than making passive molecules with specific binding affinities or building nano-scale mechanically active devices. We present a thermodynamically consistent model for the operation of such a fueled enzyme, which uses the energy from a favorable reaction to undergo non-equilibrium conformational changes that in turn catalyze a chemical reaction on an attached substrate molecule. We show that enzymatic function can emerge through a bifurcation upon appropriate implementation of momentum conservation on the effective reaction coordinates of the low-dimensional description of the enzyme, and thanks to a generically present dissipative coupling. Our results can complement the recently developed strategies for de novo enzyme design based on machine learning approaches

Abstract:

Gels are soft elastic materials made of a three-dimensional cross-linked polymer network and featuring both elastic and dissipative responses under external mechanical stimuli. Here we investigate how such gels mediate the organization of embedded magnetic microparticles when driven by an external field. By constructing a continuum theory, we demonstrate that the collective dynamics of the embedded particles result from the delicate balance between magnetic dipole-dipole interactions, thermal fluctuations and elasticity of the polymer network, verified by our experiments. The proposed model could be extended to other soft magnetic composites in order to predict how the elastic interactions mediate the aggregation of the embedded elements, fostering technological implications for multifunctional hydrogel materials.

Abstract:

In the version of the article initially published, the declaration of no competing interests was missing, and has now been inserted in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.