Stretching short biopolymers by fields and forces

Abstract

We study the mechanical properties of semiflexible polymers when the contour length of the polymer is comparable to its persistence length. We compute the exact average end-to-end distance and shape of the polymer for different boundary conditions, and show that boundary effects can lead to significant deviations from the well-known long-polymer results. We also consider the case of stretching a uniformly charged biopolymer by an electric field, for which we compute the average extension and the average shape, which is shown to be trumpetlike. Our results also apply to long biopolymers when thermal fluctuations have been smoothed out by a large applied field or force.

10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Excluded-Volume Effects in Tethered-Particle Experiments: Bead Size Matters
• Apparent Persistence Length Renormalization of Bent DNA
• Elasticity of semiflexible polymers in two dimensions
• Linear response of a grafted semiflexible polymer to a uniform force field

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Theory and Monte Carlo simulations for the stretching of flexible and semi-flexible single polymer chains under external fields
• Semiflexible polymers under external fields confined to two dimensions
• Elasticity of a semiflexible filament with a discontinuous tension due to a cross-link or a molecular motor
• Spectrins in Axonal Cytoskeletons: Dynamics Revealed by Extensions and Fluctuations
• Tensile elasticity of semiflexible polymers with hinge defects
• How a single stretched polymer responds coherently to a minute oscillation in fluctuating environments: An entropic stochastic resonance