Overlapping two self-avoiding polymers in a closed cylindrical pore: Implications for chromosome segregation in a bacterial cell.

We study the spatial organization and segregation of two self-avoiding polymers trapped inside a closed cylindrical pore. Using molecular-dynamics simulations, we show how confinement shapes the chains, especially their mutual (entropic) force, chain miscibility, and segregation dynamics. Under strong confinement, the chains are shown to repel more strongly and thus segregate better if they are shorter and the confining space is more asymmetric, in contrast to the spherically confined case, where nonlinear chain topology is required for chain partitioning in equilibrium. When applied to bacterial chromosomes, our results imply that chromosome miscibility depends on how they are compacted and structured inside the cell (by proteins and supercoiling). Finally, longitudinal confinement is shown to have nontrivial effects on segregation dynamics by randomizing and thus slowing down the segregation process, which would otherwise be assisted with entropic forces.