Stukalin Evgeny B, Kolomeisky Anatoly B
Department of Chemistry, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.
J Chem Phys. 2004 Jul 8;121(2):1097-104. doi: 10.1063/1.1759316.
The growth dynamics of rigid biopolymers, consisting of N parallel protofilaments, is investigated theoretically using simple approximate models. In our approach, the structure of a polymer's growing end and lateral interactions between protofilaments are explicitly taken into account, and it is argued that only few configurations are important for a biopolymer's growth. As a result, exact analytic expressions for growth velocity and dispersion are obtained for any number of protofilaments and arbitrary geometry of the growing end of the biopolymer. Our theoretical predictions are compared with a full description of biopolymer growth dynamics for the simplest N=2 model. It is found that the results from the approximate theory are approaching the exact ones for large lateral interactions between the protofilaments. Our theory is also applied to analyze the experimental data on the growth of microtubules.
利用简单的近似模型对由N条平行原纤维组成的刚性生物聚合物的生长动力学进行了理论研究。在我们的方法中，明确考虑了聚合物生长末端的结构以及原纤维之间的横向相互作用，并且认为只有少数构型对生物聚合物的生长很重要。结果，对于任意数量的原纤维和生物聚合物生长末端的任意几何形状，都获得了生长速度和分散度的精确解析表达式。我们的理论预测与最简单的N = 2模型的生物聚合物生长动力学的完整描述进行了比较。发现对于原纤维之间较大的横向相互作用，近似理论的结果接近精确结果。我们的理论还被应用于分析微管生长的实验数据。
