Intermediate Filaments in Small Configuration Spaces
2012-02-22 | journal article; research paper. A publication with affiliation to the University of Göttingen.
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- Authors
- Nöding, Bernd; Köster, Sarah
- Abstract
- Intermediate filaments play a key role in cell mechanics. Apart from their great importance from a biomedical point of view, they also act as a very suitable micrometer-sized model system for semiflexible polymers. We perform a statistical analysis of the thermal fluctuations of individual filaments confined in microchannels. The small channel width and the resulting deflections at the walls give rise to a reduction of the configuration space by about 2 orders of magnitude. This circumstance enables us to precisely measure the intrinsic persistence length of vimentin intermediate filaments and to show that they behave as ideal wormlike chains; we observe that small fluctuations in perpendicular planes decouple. Furthermore, the inclusion of results for confined actin filaments demonstrates that the Odijk confinement regime is valid over at least 1 order of magnitude in persistence length.
- Issue Date
- 22-February-2012
- Journal
- Physical Review Letters
- Organization
- Institut für Röntgenphysik
- Working Group
- RG Köster (Cellular Biophysics)
- ISSN
- 0031-9007
- Language
- English
- Subject(s)
- cytoskeleton; cellular biophysics; microfluidics