Work

Exact statistics of helical wormlike chains with twist-bend coupling

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We present a solution for the Green's function for the general case of a helical wormlike chain with twist-bend coupling and demonstrate the applicability of our solution for evaluating general structural and mechanical chain properties. We find that twist-bend coupling renormalizes the persistence length and the force-extension curves relative to wormlike chains. Analysis of intrinsically twisted polymers shows that incorporation of twist-bend coupling results in the oscillatory behavior in principal tangent correlations that are observed in some studies of synthetic polymers. The exact nature of our solution provides a framework to evaluate the role of twist-bend coupling on polymer properties, such as DNA bound to histones and motivates the reinterpretation of existing biopolymer experimental data.

Source: Physical review. E

DOI: 10.1103/88jw-svqj

Authors: Ashesh Ghosh, Kranthi K. Mandadapu, David T. Limmer

Institutions: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute

Language: English

Topic: DNA and Nucleic Acid Chemistry

Subfield: Molecular Biology

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Advanced Scientific Computing Research