Abstract
Any macroscopic deformation of a filamentous bundle is necessarily accompanied by local sliding and/or stretching of the constituent filaments1,2. Yet the nature of the sliding friction between two aligned filaments interacting through multiple contacts remains largely unexplored. Here, by directly measuring the sliding forces between two bundled F-actin filaments, we show that these frictional forces are unexpectedly large, scale logarithmically with sliding velocity as in solid-like friction, and exhibit complex dependence on the filaments’ overlap length. We also show that a reduction of the frictional force by orders of magnitude, associated with a transition from solid-like friction to Stokes’s drag, can be induced by coating F-actin with polymeric brushes. Furthermore, we observe similar transitions in filamentous microtubules and bacterial flagella. Our findings demonstrate how altering a filament’s elasticity, structure and interactions can be used to engineer interfilament friction and thus tune the properties of fibrous composite materials.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge useful discussions with N. Upadhyaya, M. Hagan and R. Bruinsma. A.W., D.W. and W.S. were supported by National Science Foundation grants CMMI-1068566, NSF-MRI-0923057 and NSF-MRSEC-1206146. F.H. and Z.D. were supported by Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award DE-SC0010432TDD. V.V. acknowledges FOM and NWO for financial support. L.M. was supported by Harvard-NSF MRSEC and the MacArthur Foundation. We also acknowledge use of the Brandeis MRSEC optical microscopy facility (NSF-MRSEC-1206146).
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A.W. and Z.D. conceived the experiments. A.W. measured actin sliding friction and performed computer simulations. F.H., A.W. and D.W. performed microtubule sliding experiments. W.S. performed flagella sliding dynamics. A.W.C.L. developed a preliminary theoretical model that explains the velocity dependence of sliding friction. L.M. and V.V. developed the theoretical model that explains the dependence of sliding friction on overlap length. A.W., V.V., L.M. and Z.D. wrote the manuscript. All authors revised the manuscript.
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Ward, A., Hilitski, F., Schwenger, W. et al. Solid friction between soft filaments. Nature Mater 14, 583–588 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4222
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4222
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