Magic numbers in polymer phase separation -- the importance of being rigid

Abstract

Cells possess non-membrane-bound bodies, many of which are now understood as phase-separated condensates. One class of such condensates is composed of two polymer species, where each consists of repeated binding sites that interact in a one-to-one fashion with the binding sites of the other polymer. Previous biologically-motivated modeling of such a two-component system surprisingly revealed that phase separation is suppressed for certain combinations of numbers of binding sites. This phenomenon, dubbed the "magic-number effect", occurs if the two polymers can form fully-bonded small oligomers by virtue of the number of binding sites in one polymer being an integer multiple of the number of binding sites of the other. Here we use lattice-model simulations and analytical calculations to show that this magic-number effect can be greatly enhanced if one of the polymer species has a rigid shape that allows for multiple distinct bonding conformations. Moreover, if one species is rigid, the effect is robust over a much greater range of relative concentrations of the two species. Our findings advance our understanding of the fundamental physics of two-component polymer-based phase-separation and suggest implications for biological and synthetic systems.