This note reviews a bio-inspired scheme for aggregating autonomous agents in the absence of global communication or coordination, a problem that is known as Decentralized Gathering. We present results on the clustering behavior of the agents, as we vary the main parameter that controls the agents’ aggregation. Our observations show that there exist two phenomenologically different behaviors, ch...

The aim of this paper is to establish rigorous results on the large time behavior of nonlocal models for aggregation, including the possible presence of nonlinear diffusion terms modeling local repulsions. We show that, as expected from the practical motivation as well as from numerical simulations, one obtains concentrated densities (Dirac δ distributions) as stationary solutions and large tim...

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Submitted for the MAR08 Meeting of The American Physical Society Unusual aggregation behavior of colloids coated with palindromic DNA MIRJAM LEUNISSEN, REMI DREYFUS, DAVID PINE, PAUL CHAIKIN, New York University — Coating particles with single-stranded DNA ‘sticky ends’ gives excellent control over the specificity, strength and range of their interactions. Usually, a pair of complementary ‘Wats...

Repeat length disease thresholds vary among the 10 expanded polyglutamine (polyQ) repeat diseases, from about 20 to about 50 glutamine residues. The unique amino acid sequences flanking the polyQ segment are thought to contribute to these repeat length thresholds. The specific portions of the flanking sequences that modulate polyQ properties are not always clear, however. This ambiguity may be ...

The rodlike ionogenic polymers poly(p-pyridylene-phenylene) and poly(p-pyridylene/phenylene-ethynylene) form polyelectrolytes when protonated with toluene sulfonic acid or ethane sulfonic acid in chloroform solution. This molecular modification, clearly indicated by a marked red shift of the UV absorption band, induces the formation of prolate, bundlelike aggregates, whose size and shape are ob...

A peptide gemini surfactant, 12-G(NH2)LG(NH2)-12, has been constructed with two dodecyl chains separately attached to the two terminals of a glutamic acid-lysine-glutamic acid peptide and the aggregation behavior of the surfactant was studied in aqueous solution. The 12-G(NH2)LG(NH2)-12 molecules form fiber-like precipitates around pH 7.0, and the precipitation range is widened on increasing th...

We report on biohybrid surfactants, termed "giant amphiphiles", in which a protein or an enzyme acts as the polar head group and a synthetic polymer as the apolar tail. It is demonstrated that the modification of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and myoglobin (Mb) with an apolar polymer chain through the cofactor reconstitution method yields giant amphiphiles that form spherical aggregates (vesicle...

A longstanding challenge in studies of neurodegenerative disease has been that the pathologic protein aggregates in live tissue are not amenable to structural and kinetic analysis by conventional methods. The situation is put in focus by the current progress in demarcating protein aggregation in vitro, exposing new mechanistic details that are now calling for quantitative in vivo comparison. In...