Dynamics of Active Rouse Chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-thermal active forces influence the dynamics of Rouse polymers, providing a generic analytical framework and connecting findings to biological experiments on chromatin motion.

Contribution

It introduces a generic analytical approach to study active forces in Rouse chains and suggests experimental methods to characterize active forces in chromatin dynamics.

Findings

Active forces alter Rouse chain dynamics significantly.

Theoretical results connect to experimental observations of DNA telomeres.

Proposes new experiments to measure active forces in chromatin.

Abstract

We consider how active forces modeled as non-thermal random noise affect the average dynamical properties of a Rouse polymer. As the power spectrum of the noise is not known we keep the analytical treatment as generic as possible and then present results for a few examples of active noise. We discuss the connection between our results and recent experimental studies of dynamics of labeled DNA telomeres in living cells, and propose new chromatin tracking experiments that will allow one to determine the statistical properties of the active forces associated with chromatin remodeling processes.