Stephen F Bush, Sanjay Goel. The Impact of Persistence Length on the Communication Efficiency of Microtubules and CNTs. In Nano-Net 4th International ICST Conference, Nano-Net 2009, Lucerne, Switzerland, October 18-20, 2009. Volume 20 of Publisher Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009. [doi]
There are similarities between microtubules in living cells and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Both microtubules and carbon nanotubes have a similar physical structure and properties and both are capable of transporting information at the nanoscale. Microtubules and carbon nanotubes can also self-organize to create random graph structures, which can be used as communication networks. The behavior of microtubules can be understood by investigating the behavior of their synthetic counterparts, namely, carbon nanotubes (CNT). At the same time, networks of CNTs may be used for molecular-level transport in the human body for treatment of diseases. This paper seeks to examine the basic properties of the networks created by CNTs and microtubules. This behavior depends strongly on the alignment of bond segments and filaments, which in turn depends on the persistence length of the tubes. Persistence length is also important in analyzing other structures such as DNA; however, the focus in this paper is on nanotube structures and microtubules. We use graph spectral analysis for analyzing a simulated CNT network in which a network graph is extracted from the layout of the tubes and graph properties of the resultant graphs are examined. The paper presents the results of the simulation with tubes of different persistence lengths.