  The advent of solid state nanodevices allows for interrogating the
physico-chemical properties of a polyelectrolyte chain by electrophoretically
driving it through a nanopore. Salient dynamical aspects of the translocation
process have been recently characterized by theoretical and computational
studies of model polymer chains free from self-entanglement. However,
sufficiently long equilibrated chains are necessarily knotted. The impact of
such topological "defects" on the translocation process is largely unexplored,
and is addressed in this study. By using Brownian dynamics simulations on a
coarse-grained polyelectrolyte model we show that knots, despite being trapped
at the pore entrance, do not "per se" cause the translocation process to jam.
Rather, knots introduce an effective friction that increases with the applied
force, and practically halts the translocation above a threshold force. The
predicted dynamical crossover, which is experimentally verifiable, is of
relevance in applicative contexts, such as DNA nanopore sequencing.

Soft Condensed Matter;Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics;Biological Physics