Solvable model for polymorphic dynamics of biofilaments

Hervé Mohrbach, Igor M. Kulić
2012 Physical Review E  
We investigate an analytically tractable toy model for thermally induced polymorphic dynamics of cooperatively rearranging biofilaments - like microtubules. The proposed 4 -block model, which can be seen as a coarse-grained approximation of the full polymorphic tube model, permits a complete analytical treatment of all thermodynamic properties including correlation functions and angular fourier mode distributions. Due to its mathematical tractability the model straightforwardly leads to some
more » ... sical insights in recently discussed phenomena like the "length dependent persistence length". We show that a polymorphic filament can disguise itself as a classical worm like chain on small and on large scales and yet display distinct anomalous tell-tale features indicating an inner switching dynamics on intermediate length scales.
doi:10.1103/physreve.85.031903 pmid:22587119 fatcat:5zqu54exercurmbbw4sw6xntny