A mechanical model of bacteriophage DNA ejection
Biological Physics
2017-05-31 v1 Subcellular Processes
Abstract
Single molecule experiments on bacteriophages show an exponential scaling for the dependence of mobility on the length of DNA within the capsid. It has been suggested that this could be due to the "capstan mechanism" -- the exponential amplification of friction forces that result when a rope is wound around a cylinder as in a ship's capstan. Here we describe a desktop experiment that illustrates the effect. Though our model phage is a million times larger, it exhibits the same scaling observed in single molecule experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.10678,
title = {A mechanical model of bacteriophage DNA ejection},
author = {Rahul Arun and Sandip Ghosal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.10678},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
17 pages, 2 figures, 1 table + Supplementary Information