Effect of Intrinsic Curvature on Semiflexible Polymers

TL;DR

This paper investigates how intrinsic curvature affects the conformational behavior of semiflexible polymers, providing exact correlation functions and distinguishing features from traditional models, with implications for biopolymers.

Contribution

It offers exact analytical results for tangent correlations and end-to-end distance distributions in curved polymers, highlighting effects not captured by standard worm-like chain models.

Findings

Correlation function decays exponentially without oscillations

Effective persistence length varies with chain length

Curved chains differ from WLC in loop formation probability

Abstract

Recently many important biopolymers have been found to possess intrinsic curvature. Tubulin protofilaments in animal cells, FtsZ filaments in bacteria and double stranded DNA are examples. We examine how intrinsic curvature influence the conformational statistics of such polymers. We give exact results for the tangent-tangent spatial correlation function C(r) = t(s).t(s + r), both in two and three dimensions. Contrary to expectation, C(r) does not show any oscillatory behavior, rather decays exponentially and the effective persistence length has strong length dependence for short polymers. We also compute the distribution function P(R) of the end to end distance R and show how curved chains can be distinguihed from WLC using loop formation probability.