Spontaneous helicity of a polymer with side-loops confined to a cylinder

Abstract

Inspired by recent experiments on the spatial organization of bacterial chromosomes, we consider a type of "bottle brush" polymer consisting of a flexible backbone chain, to which flexible side loops are connected. We show that such a model with an open linear backbone spontaneously adopts a helical structure with a well-defined pitch when confined to small cylindrical volume. This helicity persists over a range of sizes and aspect-ratios of the cylinder, provided the packing fraction of the chain is suitably large. We analyze this results in terms of the interplay between the effective stiffness and actual intra-chain packing effects caused by the side-loops in response to the confinement. For the case of a circular backbone, mimicking e.g. the E. coli chromosome, the polymer adopts a linearized configuration of two parallel helices connected at the cylinder poles.