title: Tightness of random knotting.
abstract: Long polymers in solution frequently adopt knotted configurations. To understand the physical properties of knotted polymers, it is important to find out whether the knots formed at thermodynamic equilibrium are spread over the whole polymer chain or rather are localized as tight knots. We present here a method to analyze the knottedness of short linear portions of simulated random chains. Using this method, we observe that knot-determining domains are usually very tight, so that, for example, the preferred size of the trefoil-determining portions of knotted polymer chains corresponds to just seven freely jointed segments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick 08903, USA.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Katritch
authors.forename: W K
authors.initials: WK
authors.lastname: Olson
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vologodskii
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dubochet
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Stasiak
mesh_terms: D008958:Models, Molecular; D008968:Molecular Conformation; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D011897:Random Allocation
chemical_list: D011108:Polymers