Anomalous diffusion in the presence of mobile obstacles

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Published 11 November 2009 Europhysics Letters Association
, , Citation A. Wedemeier et al 2009 EPL 88 38004 DOI 10.1209/0295-5075/88/38004

0295-5075/88/3/38004

Abstract

In this letter a lattice model for the diffusional transport of binding proteins in a dynamic chromatin fiber network is proposed. Dynamic dense networks are created by a combined version of the bond fluctuation method and a Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm. In the presence of binding affinities between protein and chromatin transient subdiffusion occurs for small particles. However, by comparing diffusion of binding particles in a static and a dynamic chain network, we demonstrate that binding properties do have a much stronger influence on particles in the static chain network than in the dynamic chain network: fluctuations of the chromatin fiber network weaken the effect of binding affinities on the diffusional transport of particles, i.e. in the presence of chromatin fluctuations the transport of small binding proteins is less anomalous. At the same time we show that dynamical fibers speed up the transport of binding proteins.

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10.1209/0295-5075/88/38004