{"id":232660,"date":"2026-03-06T01:26:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T07:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/polymers-that-crawl-like-worms-how-materials-can-develop-direction-without-being-told-where-to-go"},"modified":"2026-03-06T01:26:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T07:26:41","slug":"polymers-that-crawl-like-worms-how-materials-can-develop-direction-without-being-told-where-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/polymers-that-crawl-like-worms-how-materials-can-develop-direction-without-being-told-where-to-go","title":{"rendered":"Polymers that crawl like worms: How materials can develop direction without being told where to go"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/polymers-that-crawl-like-worms-how-materials-can-develop-direction-without-being-told-where-to-go2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the University of Vienna have uncovered a surprising phenomenon: polymer chains with segments that simply fluctuate at different intensities can spontaneously develop directional, persistent motion when densely packed\u2014even though nothing in the system points them in any particular direction. This \u201centropic tug of war,\u201d driven by fundamental physical constraints, could help explain how DNA organizes and moves inside living cells and may lead to new materials. The study is <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/rkms-2v1l\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Physical Review X.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThink of a chain threaded through a dense forest of trees, which represent obstacles posed by the other chains in the system. One end of the chain is being shaken much more vigorously than the other,\u201d explains lead author Jan Smrek from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna. \u201cYou might expect it to just wiggle randomly in place. But we found that because the chain has to find its way by going in-between the trees, the difference in shaking intensity creates an imbalance that actually propels the entire chain forward through the forest.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This analogy can be conferred to a polymer, a large molecule consisting of many units linked together in a long chain, such as DNA. The Viennese research team\u2014Adam H\u00f6fler, Iurii Chubak, Christos Likos and Jan Smrek\u2014used computer simulations and analytical theory to show that this directed motion arises purely from topological constraints. When polymer chains are entangled and cannot pass through each other, segments with stronger fluctuations generate larger entropic forces. This creates an imbalance that pushes the entire chain forward along its own contour, with the stronger fluctuating part acting as the \u201chead of the snake\u201d moving through the forest of obstacles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at the University of Vienna have uncovered a surprising phenomenon: polymer chains with segments that simply fluctuate at different intensities can spontaneously develop directional, persistent motion when densely packed\u2014even though nothing in the system points them in any particular direction. This \u201centropic tug of war,\u201d driven by fundamental physical constraints, could help explain how [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}