The roles of patchy attractions and Brownian motion in fundamental biological processes in a model cell

Microscopic forces and physical phenomena at the colloidal scale are involved with fundamental processes inside living cells [Maheshwari et al., Phys. Rev. Fluids, 2019]. Examples of such phenomena include Brownian motion, confinement within the boundary of a cell membrane or wall, and hydrodynamic & electrostatic interactions between constituents of the cellular milieu (e.g. proteins). In the case of electrostatic interactions, isotropic inter-particle potentials are often insufficient to reproduce experimental results due to anisotropic charge distributions on protein surfaces [Bucciarelli et al., Sci. Rep., 2018]. To connect these microscopic forces to whole-cell functions, we examine the interplay between these colloidal-scale phenomena in dynamic simulations. Specifically, we use coarse-grained, patchy simulations to study the biological process of translation elongation in a model prokaryotic cell. Here, we present our results investigating the structure and dynamics of these coarse-grained systems, probing the inseparable connection between colloidal-scale transport and biological function.