Mechanical stretching forces oppose osmotic lens swelling

Osmotic Swelling Behavior of Bovine Cartilage

Introduction Cartilage is a complex tissue whose extracellular matrix mainly consists of charged proteoglycan (PG) assemblies imbedded in a fibrous collagen network. PGs attract water and repel each other due to their negative charges generating a high swelling pressure. Collagens are proteins that form the fibrillar meshwork providing cartilage with its tensile strength. Cartilage extracellula...

Mechanical Stretching Devices

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Stretching short biopolymers by fields and forces.

We study the mechanical properties of semiflexible polymers when the contour length of the polymer is comparable to its persistence length. We compute the exact average end-to-end distance and shape of the polymer for different boundary conditions, and show that boundary effects can lead to significant deviations from the well-known long-polymer results. We also consider the case of stretching ...

Theory of Biopolymer Stretching at High Forces.

We provide a unified theory for the high force entropic elasticity of biopolymers solely in terms of the persistence length, ξp , and the monomer spacing, a. When the force f>ℱ h ~ kBTξp /a2 the biopolymers behave as freely jointed chains (FJCs) while in the range ℱ l ~ kBT/ξp <f<ℱ h the worm-like chain (WLC) is a better model. We show that ξp can be estimated from the force extension curve (FE...

Manipulation of Colloids by Osmotic Forces