paper

Folding and cytoplasm viscoelasticity contribute jointly to chromosome dynamics

arXiv:1703.10841 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.088101

Abstract

The chromosome is a key player of cell physiology, and its dynamics provides valuable information about its physical organization. In both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the short-time motion of chromosomal loci has been described as a Rouse model in a simple or viscoelastic medium. However, little emphasis has been put on the role played by the folded organization of chromosomes on the local dynamics. Clearly, stress-propagation, and thus dynamics, must be affected by such organization, but a theory allowing to extract such information from data, e.g.\ of two-point correlations, is lacking. Here, we describe a theoretical framework able to answer this general polymer dynamics question, and we provide a general scaling analysis of the stress-propagation time between two loci at a given arclength distance along the chromosomal coordinate. The results suggest a precise way to detect folding information from the dynamical coupling of chromosome segments. Additionally, we realize this framework in a specific theoretical model of a polymer with variable-range interactions in a viscoelastic medium characterized by a tunable scaling exponent, where we derive analytical estimates of the correlation functions.

14 pages including supplementary materials

References in corpus (1)

Cited by in corpus (9)