Crunching Biofilament Rings
Abstract
We discuss a curious example for the collective mechanical behavior of coupled non-linear monomer units entrapped in a circular filament. Within a simple model we elucidate how multistability of monomer units and exponentially large degeneracy of the filament's ground state emerge as a collective feature of the closed filament. Surprisingly, increasing the monomer frustration, i.e., the bending prestrain within the circular filament, leads to a conformational softening of the system. The phenomenon, that we term polymorphic crunching, is discussed and applied to a possible scenario for membrane tube deformation by switchable dynamin or FtsZ filaments. We find an important role of cooperative inter-unit interaction for efficient ring induced membrane fission.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1408.6787,
title = {Crunching Biofilament Rings},
author = {Julien Fierling and Martin Michael Müller and Hervé Mohrbach and Albert Johner and Igor M. Kulić},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.6787},
year = {2015}
}