Measurement of the persistence length of polymerized actin using fluorescence microscopy

Abstract

Single actin filaments were confined between bovine-serum-albumine-coated glass plates, with a separation of about 1 μm, and their flickering Brownian movement was observed by fluorescence microscopy. The rigidity of the filaments was measured by extracting the correlation function given by the mean dot product between unit tangent vectors of an isolated filament. The result is consistent with current rigidity values found in the literature.