Elasticity of biopolymer filaments

Within the general one-dimensional theory of nonlinear elasticity we analyze the elasticity of biopolymer filaments. The approach adopted is purely mechanical but is reconciled with statistical physics approaches and allows for a proper formulation of boundary-value problems. By specializing the general framework we obtain force–extension relations for inextensible filaments and show how previous work on the biophysics of filaments fits within the framework. On the other hand, within the same framework, the theory of extensible filaments, which is appropriate for semi-flexible filaments such as F-actin, enables us to fit representative F-actin data. The specific formulas derived are relatively simple and the parameters involved have direct mechanical interpretations and are immediately related to the filament properties, including the initial end-to-end length, contour length and persistence length.