Junctional angle of a bihanded helix.
Helical filaments having sections of reversed chirality are common phenomena in the biological realm. The apparent angle between the two sections of opposite handedness provides information about the geometry and elasticity of the junctional region. In this paper, the governing differential equations for the local helical axis are developed, and asymptotic solutions of the governing equations are solved by perturbation theory. The asymptotic solutions are compared with the corresponding numerical solutions, and the relative error at second order is found to be less than 1.5% over a range of biologically relevant curvature and torsion values from 0 to 1/2 in dimensionless units.
Richard Berlin Center for Cell Analysis & Modeling, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut 06030, USA and Group of Applied Mathematics and Computational Biology, IBENS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris 75005, France.
Jing
J
Yang
Richard Berlin Center for Cell Analysis & Modeling, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut 06030, USA and Departments of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.
Charles W
CW
Wolgemuth
Richard Berlin Center for Cell Analysis & Modeling, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut 06030, USA and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
Greg
G
Huber
D003198:Computer Simulation; D008958:Models, Molecular; D017433:Protein Structure, Secondary