2005/10/31 by Yuko Hori, Yûko Hori, Ashok Prasad +2 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemical Engineering · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Electrohydrodynamics and Fluid Dynamics #Microfluidic and Bio-sensing Technologies #Rheology and Fluid Dynamics Studies #cond-mat.soft #q-bio.BM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.75.041904
published as PHYSICAL REVIEW E 75, 041904 (2007) · 10 pages, 7 figures
openalex publication_date 2007/04/03 · arxiv created 2007/04/06 · arxiv updated 2013/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.