We show that the kinetics of microribbon formation of amelogenin molecules iswell described by a combination of translational and rotational diffusion of asimplified anisotropic bipolar model consisting of hydrophobic sphericalcolloid particles and a point charge located on each particle surface. Thecolloid particles interact via a standard depletion attraction while the pointcharges interact through a screened Coulomb repulsion. We study the kineticsvia a Brownian dynamics simulation of both translational and rotational motionsand show that the anisotropy brought in by the charge dramatically affects thekinetic pathway of cluster formation and our simple model captures the mainfeatures of the experimental observations.
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