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Active Dynamics of Semiflexible Polymers


  Abhijit Ghosh  ,  N. S. Gov  
 Weizmann Institute of Science

Motivated by recent experiments that observed a role of active agents in the motion of the DNA and chromosomes, we have investigated the effect of active agents (eg. motor proteins, transcription complex) on the dynamics of biopolymers (eg. Actin, micro-tubules, DNA).

We have implemented a Langevin description with colored noise for the dynamics of a semiflexible polymer (Worm Like Chain). By studying the MSD-s of a “tagged” monomer and centre-of-mass of the polymer, we obtain continuous evolution of the MSD exponent through different time regimes that are colored/ white noise dominated. 
To test the predictions of our model, we perform extensive Brownian dynamics simulations and obtain good agreement with the analytic results. We are therefore able to quantify the deviations from equilibrium thermal dynamics, and make specific predictions on how these deviations are related to the microscopic properties of the underlying active processes.