Buckling influence of intermediate filaments with and without surface effects

Intermediate filaments are the mechanical ropes for both cytoskeleton and nucleoskeleton of the cell which provide tensile force to these skeletons. In providing the mechanical support to the cell, they are likely to buckle. We used conventional Euler buckling model to find the critical buckling force under different boundary conditions which they assume during different functions. However, there are many experimental and theoretical studies about other cytoskeleton components which demonstrate that due to mechanical coupling with the surrounding surface, the critical buckling force increases considerably. Motivated with these results, we also investigated the influence of surface effects on the critical buckling force of intermediate filaments. The surface effects become profound because of increasing ratio of surface area of intermediate filaments to bulk at nano-scale. The model has been solved analytically to obtain relations for the critical forces for the buckling of intermediate filaments without and with surface effects. We found that critical buckling force with surface effects increases to a large extent due to mechanical coupling of intermediate filaments with the surrounding surface. Our study may be useful to develop a unified experimental protocol to characterize the physical properties of Intermediate filaments and may be helpful in understanding many biological phenomenon involving intermediate filaments.