Buckling and enforced stretching of bio-filaments

We examine the force needed to extend/compress a bio-filament, a key issue in the study of cytoskeleton mechanics and polymer physics, by considering both the associated stretching and bending deformations. Specifically, closed form relationships are derived to predict the buckling of stiff filaments such as F-actin and microtubules. Our results clearly demonstrate that the maximum force a 2D filament can sustain is higher than the Euler buckling load whereas the force in a 3D filament is always below it, and hence clarify some of the ambiguities in the literature. In addition, analytical expression is also obtained to describe how the extensional force increases when a flexible molecule, like DNA, is stretched close to its contour length, which has been shown to fit a variety of experimental data very well. Our theory provides important corrections/improvements to several well-known existing models. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.