Zhou Zicong
Department of Physics, Tamkang University, New Taipei City, 25137 Taiwan, Republic of China.
Phys Rev E. 2020 Sep;102(3-1):032405. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.102.032405.
We study the effects of the intrinsic curvature (IC), intrinsic twist rate (ITR), anisotropic bending rigidities, sequence disorder, and temperature (T) on the persistence length (l_{p}) of a two- or three-dimensional semiflexible biopolymer. We develop some general expressions to evaluate exactly these effects. We find that a moderate IC alone reduces l_{p} considerably. Our results indicate that the centerline of the filament keeps as a helix in a rather large range of T when ITR is small. However, a large ITR can counterbalance the effect of IC and the result is insensitive to the twist rigidity. Moreover, a weak randomness in IC and ITR can result in an "overexpanded" state. Meanwhile, when ITR is small, l_{p} is not a monotonic function of T but can have either minimum or maximum at some T, and in the two-dimensional case the maximum is more obvious than that in the three-dimensional case. These results reveal that to obtain a proper size at a finite T for an intrinsically curved semiflexible biopolymer, proper values of bending rigidities and ITR are necessary but a large twist rigidity may be only a by-product. Our findings are instructive in controlling the size of a semiflexible biopolymer in organic synthesis since the mean end-to-end distance and radius of gyration of a long semiflexible biopolymer are proportional to l_{p}.
我们研究了二维或三维半柔性生物聚合物的固有曲率(IC)、固有扭曲率(ITR)、各向异性弯曲刚度、序列无序度和温度(T)对持久长度((l_{p}))的影响。我们推导出了一些通用表达式来精确评估这些影响。我们发现,仅适度的固有曲率就能显著降低持久长度。我们的结果表明,当固有扭曲率较小时,在相当大的温度范围内,细丝的中心线保持为螺旋形状。然而,较大的固有扭曲率可以抵消固有曲率的影响,结果对扭曲刚度不敏感。此外,固有曲率和固有扭曲率的微弱随机性会导致一种“过度膨胀”状态。同时,当固有扭曲率较小时,持久长度不是温度的单调函数,而是在某些温度下可能有最小值或最大值,并且在二维情况下最大值比三维情况下更明显。这些结果表明,对于具有固有曲率的半柔性生物聚合物,要在有限温度下获得合适的尺寸,弯曲刚度和固有扭曲率的合适值是必要的,但较大的扭曲刚度可能只是一个副产品。我们的发现对于在有机合成中控制半柔性生物聚合物尺寸具有指导意义,因为长半柔性生物聚合物的平均端到端距离和回转半径与持久长度成正比。