| Polymers and their elementary subunits, called monomers, come in an immense variety of structures and sizes, and are of great importance for their material properties as well as a multitude of biological functions. The emphasis here is on semiflexible polymers, which are identified by their intermediate degree of stiffness. Their individual as well as their collective properties when assembled into entangled networks is a topic of great interest to polymer physics, materials science, and biology. Some of the most important semiflexible polymers are biopolymers, with such prominent examples as DNA, F-actin, and microtubules. Their functions range from their use as structural elements in the cytoskeleton of most plant and animal cells, to their role as transport tracks for molecular motors, and the storage of genetic information in their linear sequence. The two parts of this experimental and theoretical thesis address single filament aspects as well as network properties of solutions of semiflexible polymers. In the first part, we describe an optical technique for measuring the bulk properties of soft materials at the local scale. We apply it to a solution of entangled, filamentous actin, a particularly difficult material to characterize with conventional techniques. Beyond a description of measurements and apparatus, we also discuss, from a theoretical point of view, the interpretation and fundamental limitations of this and other microrheological techniques. In the second part, we describe the condensation dynamics of a single, semiflexible filament, induced by changing solvent conditions. A biologically important example of this phenomenon is the condensation of DNA into toroidal structures, which occurs, for instance, in viral capsids. Our observations of a molecular simulation motivate an unexpected pathway of collapse via a series of metastable intermediates we call "racquet" states. The analysis of the conformational energies of these structures in the absence of thermal fluctuations describes a cascade of such metastable states through which an extended filament can evolve into a ring or torus, apparently the ground state of this system. As part of this analysis, we find an unexpected discreteness in the winding number of the torus. |
