Directed Positioning and the Mechanical and Electrical Properties of F - Actin

Mark Arsenault, Haim Bau, and Yale Goldman

The measured (symbols) and predicted (solid line) variances of a filament’s thermal fluctuations as functions of position along the filament and electric field intensity. The filament’s properties are estimated by minimizing the difference between theory and experiment

Objectives:

Develop means for directed positioning of actin filaments and study the mechanical and electrical properties of the filaments.

With the aid of an AC electric field, actin filaments are suspended across a gap between a pair of gold electrodes