Positioning and stretching of actin filaments by electric fields

Abstract

The alignment of biological filaments on surfaces offers a high potential for controllable geometries in lab-on-a-chip-structures and micrototal analysis systems. Actin is a polar filamentous protein with a diameter of 7-8 nm that can be manipulated with strong electric fields. It is demonstrated that with the use of microelectrodes or nanoelectrodes and electric fields of 20 kV/m single actin filaments can be manipulated, stretched, and positioned between gold electrodes. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.