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Updated: Jul 8, 2025

C. elegans Tracking and Behavioral Measurement
Published on: November 17, 2012
Correlation functions for confined wormlike chains
Joel Gard1, Greg Morrison1,2
1Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204, USA.
Abstract:
Polymer models describing the statistics of biomolecules under confinement have applications to a wide range of single-molecule experimental techniques and give insight into biologically relevant processes in vivo. In this paper, we determine the transverse position and bending correlation functions for a wormlike chain confined within slits and cylinders (with one and two confined dimensions, respectively) using a mean-field approach that enforces rigid constraints on average. We show the theoretical predictions accurately capture the statistics of a wormlike chain from Monte Carlo simulations in both confining geometries for both weak and strong confinement. We also show that the longitudinal correlation function is accurately computed for a chain confined to a slit and leverages the accuracy of the model to suggest an experimental technique to infer the (often unobservable) transverse statistics from the (directly observable) longitudinal end-to-end distance.
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