抄録
It is essential to investigate the nanomechanical behavior of cytoskeletal actin filaments in order to understand their critical role as mechanical components in various cellular functional activities. These actin filaments consisting of monomeric molecules function in the thermal fluctuations. Hence, it is important to understand their mechanical behavior on the microscopic scale by comparing the stiffness based on thermal fluctuations with the one experimentally measured on the macroscopic scale. In this study, we perform a large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulation for a half-turn structure of an actin filament. We analyzed its longitudinal and twisting Brownian motions in equilibrium and evaluated its apparent extensional and torsional stiffness on the nanosecond scale. Upon increasing the sampling-window durations for analysis, the apparent stiffness gradually decreases and exhibits a trend to converge to a value that is close to the experimental value.
