Probing the Structure of Filamentous Nonergodic Gels by Dynamic Light Scattering

Mesh size is a crucial parameter that governs the behavior of gels made of semiflexible polymers. We show that the average mesh size of amyloid fibril gels can be extracted from simple dynamic light scattering experiments. The data analysis is performed combining theoretical descriptions of nonergodicity and semiflexible polymer dynamics. The described method works in a range of concentrations where the mesh size is comparable with the characteristic length scale associated with the probed wave-vector.