Dresden 2014 – scientific programme
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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 24: Transport and Confinement II
CPP 24.1: Talk
Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 15:00–15:15, ZEU 260
Anomalous diffusion in bicontinuous microemulsions as a model system for crowded environments — •Oliver Schipper and Thomas Hellweg — Bielefeld University, Germany
The understanding of the diffusive behaviour of proteins in living cells is crucial for the theoretical description of biological processes. As the interior of cells or certain cell organelles is often crowded with molecules, the diffusive behaviour of proteins does not follow the normal Fick type diffusion, where the mean square displacement grows linear in time <x2 > ∝ t. The diffusion is considered to be ’anomalous’: <x2 > ∝ tα (with α > 1) [1]. To better understand the dependence of the protein diffusion on a confining environment, we studied the movement of a fluorescent particle (GFP) trough a bicontinuous microemulsion via fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. The sponge like network of the microemulsion, which was characterized via small angle neutron scattering, not only slows down the translational movement of the tracer particle with decreasing domain size but also changes the characteristics of the diffusion from ’Fick like’ to ’anomalous’.
[1] T. J. Feder et al., Biophysical journal 1996, 70, 2767-2773.