Comparative Biomechanics of Thick Filaments and Thin Filaments with Functional Consequences for Muscle Contraction

Table 2

Range of persistence length for biological polymers and nanotubes.

Material	Persistence Length (𝜇m)	Comments and References
Silk	0.0004	Recombinant spider dragline silk nanofibers [132]
Titin	0.0007–0.04	For intact (rabbit skeletal) protein, individual domains, and elastic and inelastic regions [133–135]
Hyaluronan	0.0045	Articular cartilage [136]
Collagen	0.0112–0.057	Types I, II, III [136, 137]
Projectin	0.030	Lethocerus flight muscle [138]
Mucins	0.036	Human ocular [139]
Kettin	0.045	Recombinant fragments [138]
DNA	0.053	<3000 bp [140]
Intermediate filaments	1	In vitro polymerized human vimentin [77]
Cofilactin	2.2	In vitro polymerized [92]
Actin	9.0–17.7	In vitro polymerized with or without phalloidin [10, 12, 92, 141]
Nanotubes	17–32	Single walled carbon nanotubes [142]
Flagellar filaments	2.4–41.1	From bacteria [129]
Thin filaments	44–121	See Table 1
Thick filaments	27–1742	From various species and muscle types [8, 9, 71]
Microtubules	110–5200	In vitro polymerized with taxol or paclitaxel [12, 141, 143]