Institute for Medicine and Engineering Papers
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
June 2006
Abstract
The formation of kinks in a loop of bundled polyelectrolyte filaments is analyzed in terms of the thermal fluctuations of charge density due to polyvalent counterions adsorbed on the polyelectrolyte filaments. It is found that the counterion-mediated attraction energy of filaments depends on their bending. By consideration of curvature elasticity energy and counterion-mediated attraction between polyelectrolyte filaments, the characteristic width of the kink and the number of kinks per loop is found to be in reasonable agreement with existing experimental data for rings of bundled actin filaments.
Date Posted: 15 January 2008
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Copyright American Physical Society. Reprinted from Physical Review Letters, Volume 96, Issue 24, Article 247801, June 23 2004, 4 pages.
Publisher URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v96/e247801