ArticleThe journal of physical chemistry. B2021
Does Electric Friction Matter in Living Cells?
Article in The journal of physical chemistry. B, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Static and dynamic rough energy landscapes can lead to identical diffusivity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Material properties of biomolecular condensates emerge from nanoscale dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Electrostatics and hydrophobicity in the dynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2023Article
- How it feels in a cell.Trends in cell biology · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The thermal motion of charged proteins causes randomly fluctuating electric fields inside cells. According to the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, there is an additional friction force associated with such fluctuations. However, the impact of these fluctuations on the diffusion and dynamics of proteins in the cytoplasm is unclear. Here, we provide an order-of-magnitude estimate of this effect by treating electric field fluctuations within a generalized Langevin equation model with a time-dependent friction memory kernel. We find that electric friction is generally negligible compared to solvent friction. However, a significant slowdown of protein diffusion and dynamics is expected for biomolecules with high net charges such as intrinsically disordered proteins and RNA. The results show that direct contacts between biomolecules in a cell are not necessarily required to alter their dynamics.
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Registered trials
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