Figure 3. Active telomere forces can enhance selectivity of pairing.

(A) Discrimination versus intrinsic selectivity of pairing for loci, in the presence versus absence of active telomere forces. Red markers indicate simulation results performed with telomere force ϕ = 0.5. Blue markers indicate simulation results in the absence of applied telomere force. Black line indicates expected discrimination if all loci pair and unpair independently. Deviation of red markers above the line indicates that active forces allow greater discrimination than possible by passive independent pairing and unpairing. Results are based on 50 independent simulations for each condition. (B) Discrimination versus magnitude of random telomere force. Force is expressed as the ratio of the applied telomere force ϕ to the simulated thermally-driven random forces acting at each node of the chain. Markers show results from 100 simulation runs for each condition. Simulations employed k_unpair of 0.001 for correct and 0.01 for incorrect loci.