Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 33: Cytoskeletal Filaments II

BP 33.7: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 15. März 2018, 16:45–17:00, H 1028

Bending dynamics of single-walled carbon nanotubes in viscoelastic media — •Kengo Nishi¹, Fred MacKintosh^2,3,4, and Christoph Schmidt^1,5 — ¹Third Institute of Physics - Biophysics, University of Göttingen, 37077 Göttingen, Germany — ²Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA — ³Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, TX 77030, USA — ⁴Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vrije Universiteit, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands — ⁵Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27707, USA

The mechanics and dynamics of cells and tissues are dominated by semi-flexible polymer networks, whose bending stiffness leads to nontrivial dynamics. Micron-sized beads are commonly used in microrheology approaches to measure the viscoelasticity of such systems. Insertion of such probes can lead to artefacts and is often not possibly in confined geometries in living cells. Here we introduce the use of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), themselves semi-flexible polymers with non-photobleaching near-infrared fluorescence, as multiscale stealth probes for microrheology. We investigate the bending dynamics of SWNTs embedded in viscoelastic media and analyze their thermally driven shape fluctuations. We find that we can describe the bending dynamics of SWNTs by a Langevin equation with a bending term and a time-dependent memory function.