Kinetics of microribbon formation in a simplified model of amelogenin biomacromolecules

Abstract

We show that the kinetics of microribbon formation of amelogenin molecules is well described by a combination of translational and rotational diffusion of a simplified anisotropic bipolar model consisting of hydrophobic spherical colloid particles and a point charge located on each particle surface. The colloid particles interact via a standard depletion attraction while the point charges interact through a screened Coulomb repulsion. We study the kinetics via a Brownian dynamics simulation of both translational and rotational motions and show that the anisotropy brought in by the charge dramatically affects the kinetic pathway of cluster formation and our simple model captures the main features of the experimental observations.