Lowpass Filtering Capabilities of Heavily Doped Actin Filaments

Tapatosh Sadhu, Debashis De

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Actin is a globular protein abundantly found in Eukaryotic cytoskeleton. It forms double helix polymeric filamentous structure called F-actin by means of self-assembly through ATP hydrolysis. F-actin, is a highly charged polyelectrolyte, it creates an electrical shield around its surface by helping accumulate counterions. These phenomena results in differential concentration distribution of the counterions and co-ions between F-Actin and the bulk of the solution. Under controlled environment these properties can help actin filaments act as electrical conduction lines and it shows fundamental electrical properties like resistance, inductance and capacitance. Resistivity of actin can be decreased by doping the filaments with cationic components like Sodium and Potassium. On the other hand, temperature dependent movements of ions also affect these attributes for low dimensional ions. This way a temperature derived dimensional constraint is considered which contributes to modification of the electrical properties in various ways. In this paper the electrical properties were modified to design an actin filament based low pass filter considering the doping substrate as saline solution of NaCL of high concentration and the doped material is considered as Actin. Doping can be done by keeping actin in 2 M saline solution of Sodium Chloride. F-actin is proposed to work as an RLC 'T' section and thus expected to work as frequency filter circuit. To further explore the properties of the circuit, different parameters are compared and a simulated counterpart of the proposed circuit is designed with NI Multisim. The simulation results were studied for both typical and heavily doped concentrations of the solution and cutoff frequency for both the cases were evaluated.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)127-132
    Number of pages6
    JournalMaterials Focus
    Volume6
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Apr 2017

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