2020/03/26 by J. C. Gard, Gard, Joel, Greg Morrison +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Lipid Membrane Structure and Behavior #Nanopore and Nanochannel Transport Studies #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.12187
Polymer models describing the statistics of biomolecules under confinement have applications to a wide range of single molecule experimental techniques and give insight into biologically relevant processes \emin vivo. In this paper, we determine the transverse position and bending correlation functions for a wormlike chain confined within slits and cylinders (with one and two confined dimensions, respectively) using a mean field approach that enforces rigid constraints on average. We show the theoretical predictions accurately capture the statistics of a wormlike chain from Monte Carlo simulations in both confining geometries for both weak and strong confinement. We also show that the longitudinal correlation function is accurately computed for a chain confined to a slit, and leverage the accuracy of the model to suggest an experimental technique to infer the (often unobservable) transverse statistics from the (directly observable) longitudinal end-to-end distance.