Transverse fluctuations and conformations of a semi-flexible chain in a crowded environment

We study how the transverse fluctuations of a semi-flexible chain are affected by the presence of other excluded volume (EV) particles as a function of the polymer chain length L, the peristence length l_p , and the density of the EV particles. In absence of the EV particles, previously we have established universal scaling relations for the scaled end-to-end distance  〈R_N²〉/2Ll_p and the scaled transverse fluctuations 〈l_⊥²〉^1/2/L respectively, as a function of the scaled distance L/l_p  (A. Huang, A. Bhattacharya, and K. Binder, J. Chem. 140, 214902 (2014)). We explore the validity of these universal scaling relations as a function of the density of the EV particles. Our preliminary results indicate that the crowding density only weakly affects the universal scaling relations. We discuss the implication of this result in living matter.