Stochastic Aspects Of Self-Assembly
Nitin Tiwari (Theory of Polymers and Soft Matter group, Eindhoven University of Technology)

Molecular aggregation processes in a biological context occur at the level of single cell and hence not in the thermodynamic limit. This makes the role of noise coming from finite number of molecules important. The usual approach of deterministic rate equations makes it difficult to account for this noise. It is here that the kinetic Monte Carlo simulations prove useful, because of their inherent stochastic nature it is possible to study the effects of noise on the self-assembly. We investigate by mean of kinetic Monte Carlo simulation methods the impact of system size on nucleated assembly for the linear self-assembly of proteins.