| Issue |
EPL
Volume 78, Number 3, May 2007
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 38001 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/78/38001 | |
| Published online | 11 April 2007 | |
Radial distribution function for semiflexible polymers confined in microchannels
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg - Staudtstraße 7, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Received:
22
December
2006
Accepted:
12
March
2007
An analytic expression is derived for the distribution 
of the end-to-end distance 
of semiflexible polymers in external potentials to elucidate the effect of confinement on the mechanical and statistical properties of biomolecules. For parabolic confinement the result is exact, whereas for realistic potentials a self-consistent ansatz is applied, so that is given explicitly even for hard-wall confinement. The theoretical result is in good quantitative agreement with fluorescence microscopy data for actin filaments confined in rectangularly shaped microchannels. This allows an unambiguous determination of persistence length LP and the dependence of statistical properties such as Odijk's deflection length 
on the channel width D. It is shown that neglecting the effect of confinement leads to a significant overestimation of bending rigidities for filaments.
PACS: 87.15.-v – Biomolecules: structure and physical properties / 36.20.Ey – Conformation (statistics and dynamics) / 05.20.-y – Classical statistical mechanics
© Europhysics Letters Association, 2007
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.