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Updated: Aug 18, 2026

Synthesis of Cyclic Polymers and Characterization of Their Diffusive Motion in the Melt State at the Single Molecule Level
Published on: September 26, 2016
Polymerization dynamics of double-stranded biopolymers: chemical kinetic approach
Evgeny B Stukalin1, Anatoly B Kolomeisky
1Department of Chemistry, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Abstract:
The polymerization dynamics of double-stranded polymers, such as actin filaments, is investigated theoretically using simple chemical kinetic models that explicitly take into account some microscopic details of the polymer structure and the lateral interactions between the protofilaments. By considering all possible molecular configurations, the exact analytical expressions for the growth velocity and dispersion for two-stranded polymers are obtained in the case of the growing at only one end, and for the growth from both polymer ends. Exact theoretical calculations are compared with the predictions of approximate multilayer models that consider only a finite number of the most relevant polymer configurations. Our theoretical approach is applied to analyze the experimental data on the growth and fluctuations dynamics of individual single actin filaments.
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