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Soft Matter in Biology and Materials Science

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Future Blog Post

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Blog Post number 4

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Blog Post number 1

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portfolio

publications

Polymer Solar Cells: Solubility Controls Fiber Network Formation

Published in J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2015

drawing
We found that the influence of the solvent quality on the polymer fibre size can be understood in terms of classical nucleation theory.

Cite: J. J. van Franeker, G. H. L. Heintges, C. Schaefer, G. Portale, W. Li, M. M. Wienk, P. van der Schoot, R. A. J. Janssen." Polymer Solar Cells: Solubility Controls Fiber Network Formation." J. Am. Chem. Soc.. 137, 11783-11794 (2015) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/mz300218e

Membraneless organelles formed by liquid-liquid phase separation increase bacterial fitness

Published in Science Advances, 2021

drawing
Liquid-liquid phase separation of proteins to form membraneless organelles in living bacteria.

Cite: Xin Jin, Ji-Eun Lee, Charley Schaefer, Xinwei Luo, Adam J. M. Wollman, Alex L. Payne-Dwyer, Tian Tian, Xiaowei Zhang, Xiao Chen, Yingxing Li, Tom C. B. McLeish, Mark C. Leake, Fan Bai. "Membraneless organelles formed by liquid-liquid phase separation increase bacterial fitness." Science Adv.. 7, 43 (2021) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abh2929

Theoretical rheo-physics of silk: Intermolecular associations reduce the critical specific work for flow-induced crystallisation

Published in [J. Rheol](https://sor.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1122/8.0000411), 2021

drawing
Theoretical rheo-physics of silk: Intermolecular associations reduce the critical specific work for flow-induced crystallisation

Cite: Charley Schaefer & Tom C. B. McLeish, "Theoretical rheo-physics of silk: Intermolecular associations reduce the critical specific work for flow-induced crystallisation." arXiv.. (2021)

Sticker-and-Spacer Model for Amyloid Beta Condensation and Fibrillation

Published in [Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience](https://doi.org/10.3389/fnmol.2022.962526), 2022

drawing
Amyloid-Beta Aggregation

Cite: Jack Connor, Steve Quinn, Charley Schaefer, "Sticker-and-Linker Model for Amyloid Beta Condensation and Fibrillation." Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience. 15, 962526 (2022)

Competitive Binding of Force-Extensible Sticker-and-Spacer EPYC1 Polypeptides to a Patchy Colloidal Rubisco Protein

Published in arXiv, 2023

Bio-polymer networks are ubiquitous in nature and fulfil unique mechanical and biological functionalities that sensitively rely on the mesoscopic structure of the network. Understanding how these structures are encoded for by the bio-macromolecular building blocks would open up a powerful means to design novel soft materials, but remains hampered by the enormous complexity of the network down to the molecular level. We focus on the CO2-fixating ‘pyrenoid’ in eukaryotic algae as an exemplar bi-molecular network, which is composed of rigid ‘Rubisco’ holoenzymes with 8 binding sites to which any of the 5 ‘sticker strands’ of the intrinsically disordered polypeptide (IDP) ‘EPYC1’ may bind. As a consequence, a Rubisco-IDP complex has 10^8 structurally different microstates whose expectation values depend on the concentration, sticker binding strength, and on the force-extensiblity of the IDPs. We present a statistical physics approach to tackle this challenge, and apply it to self-consistently model available (i) surface plasmon resonance data on the competitive binding of cleaved (single-sticker) EPYC1 and (ii) fluorescence correlation spectroscopy data on the binding of full (five-sticker) EPYC1 chains. Beyond the quantitative agreement between our model and the experiments, the model pins down the regime of binding affinities and provides quantitative predictions on the structure of the rubisco-EPYC1 complex. Thus, we present a predictive model that enables the parametrisation and screening of IDP sequences towards complex networks of associating (bio-)polymers.

Cite: Charley Schaefer, "Competitive Binding of Force-Extensible Sticker-and-Spacer EPYC1 Polypeptides to a Patchy Colloidal Rubisco Protein." arXiv. (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05681

talks

teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

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Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

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