Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Jul 21;119(3):037801.
doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.037801. Epub 2017 Jul 18.

Shape of a Stretched Polymer

Affiliations

Shape of a Stretched Polymer

Alberto S Sassi et al. Phys Rev Lett. .

Abstract

The shape of a polymer plays an important role in its interactions with surrounding molecules. We characterize the shape and the orientational properties of a polymer chain under tension in a good solvent, a physical condition that is often realized both in single-molecule experiments and in vivo. Our findings reveal the existence of hitherto unobserved universal laws encompassing polymers with different rigidities and including the possible presence of excluded-volume effects, showing that both shape and orientation are solely determined by the force contribution to the free energy. In doing so, they also provide a simple way to retrieve these quantities from the knowledge of the force-versus-extension curve.

PubMed Disclaimer

LinkOut - more resources