Chain reconfiguration in active noise

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates how active noise influences the reconfiguration dynamics of flexible polymers, revealing that active noise slows down chain reconfiguration despite faster monomer movement.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of the impact of active noise on polymer reconfiguration times, highlighting the dominant role of noise correlation time.

Findings

Active noise increases reconfiguration time of polymers.

Long-lived active noise slows correlation loss between residues.

The correlation time of active noise, not its strength, controls reconfiguration slowdown.

Abstract

In a typical single molecule experiment, dynamics of an unfolded proteins is studied by determining the reconfiguration time using long-range Forster resonance energy transfer where the reconfiguration time is the characteristic decay time of the position correlation between two residues of the protein. In this paper we theoretically calculate the reconfiguration time for a single flexible polymer in presence of active noise. The study suggests that though the MSD grows faster, the chain reconfiguration is always slower in presence of long-lived active noise with exponential temporal correlation. Similar behavior is observed for a worm like semi-flexible chain and a Zimm chain. However it is primarily the characteristic correlation time of the active noise and not the strength that controls the increase in the reconfiguration time. In a nutshell, such active noise makes the polymer to move faster but the correlation loss between the monomers becomes slower.