Periodically driven stochastic un- and refolding transitions of biopolymers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how periodic driving in single-molecule experiments reveals stochastic resonance-like behavior in biopolymer folding/unfolding transitions, enabling extraction of key transition parameters without resolving thermal fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze periodically driven biopolymer transitions, including a polymeric linker, to extract transition parameters from stochastic resonance phenomena.

Findings

Periodic driving induces stochastic resonance-like effects.

Four basic transition parameters can be extracted from data.

Thermal fluctuations within each well are not required to be resolved.

Abstract

Mechanical single molecule experiments probe the energy profile of biomolecules. We show that in the case of a profile with two minima (like folded/unfolded) periodic driving leads to a stochastic resonance-like phenomenon. We demonstrate that the analysis of such data can be used to extract four basic parameters of such a transition and discuss the statistical requirements of the data acquisition. As advantages of the proposed scheme, a polymeric linker is explicitly included and thermal fluctuations within each well need not to be resolved.