Fig. 3.
The dependence of the unfolding force on the (temporal) unfolding order for 4 polymers with 4, 8, 12, and 16 molecules of identical proteins. Each point in the plot is the average of 400 data points. The first point in each curve represents the average of only the first peak in each of the 400 simulated force curves, the second point represents the average of only the second peak, and so on. The solid lines are fits of Eq. (13) to the simulated data, with best fit κWLC = 203, 207, 161, and 157 pN/nm, respectively, for lengths 4 through 16. The insets show the force distributions of the first, fourth, and eighth peaks, left to right, for the polymer with eight protein molecules. The parameters used for generating the data were the same as those used for Fig. 2a, except the polymer length, and the histograms in the insets were normalized in the same way as in Fig. 2b.