Dresden 2009 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 16: Stochastic Processes
BP 16.1: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 25. März 2009, 16:00–16:15, ZEU 260
Anomalous scaling of nano-pore translocation times for structured RNA molecules — Malcolm McCauley1, Robert Forties1, •Ulrich Gerland2, and Ralf Bundschuh1 — 1Department of Physics, Ohio State University — 2Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, LMU München
Translocation through a nano-pore is a new single-molecule technique to probe physical properties of biomolecules. A bulk of theoretical and computational work exists on how the main observable, the time to translocate a single molecule, depends on the length of the molecule for unstructured molecules. Here, we study this question for RNA molecules for which the breaking of the secondary structure is the main barrier for translocation. To this end, we calculate the mean translocation time of single-stranded RNA through an idealized nanopore for many randomly chosen RNA sequences. At zero voltage bias, we find that the typical translocation time depends on the sequence length with a power law, the exponent of which changes as a function of temperature and exceeds the naively expected exponent of two for purely diffusive transport at all temperatures. We rationalize this behavior theoretically.