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Crucial role of the intrinsic twist rate for the size of an intrinsically curved semiflexible biopolymer
- Source :
- Physical Review E. 102
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- American Physical Society (APS), 2020.
-
Abstract
- We study the effects of the intrinsic curvature (IC), intrinsic twist rate (ITR), anisotropic bending rigidities, sequence disorder, and temperature (T) on the persistence length (l_{p}) of a two- or three-dimensional semiflexible biopolymer. We develop some general expressions to evaluate exactly these effects. We find that a moderate IC alone reduces l_{p} considerably. Our results indicate that the centerline of the filament keeps as a helix in a rather large range of T when ITR is small. However, a large ITR can counterbalance the effect of IC and the result is insensitive to the twist rigidity. Moreover, a weak randomness in IC and ITR can result in an "overexpanded" state. Meanwhile, when ITR is small, l_{p} is not a monotonic function of T but can have either minimum or maximum at some T, and in the two-dimensional case the maximum is more obvious than that in the three-dimensional case. These results reveal that to obtain a proper size at a finite T for an intrinsically curved semiflexible biopolymer, proper values of bending rigidities and ITR are necessary but a large twist rigidity may be only a by-product. Our findings are instructive in controlling the size of a semiflexible biopolymer in organic synthesis since the mean end-to-end distance and radius of gyration of a long semiflexible biopolymer are proportional to l_{p}.
Details
- ISSN :
- 24700053 and 24700045
- Volume :
- 102
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Physical Review E
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....ed4f964cd20bb8e6617f54109fe4a7f5