Molecular theory of anomalous diffusion - Application to Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy

Abstract

The nonlinear theory of anomalous diffusion is based on particle interactions giving an explicit microscopic description of diffusive processes leading to sub-, normal, or super-diffusion as a result competitive effects between attractive and repulsive interactions. We present the explicit analytical solution to the nonlinear diffusion equation which we then use to compute the correlation function which is experimentally measured by correlation spectroscopy. The theoretical results are applicable in particular to the analysis of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy of marked molecules in biological systems. More specifically we consider the case of fluorescently labeled lipids and we find that the nonlinear correlation spectrum reproduces very well the experimental data indicating sub-diffusive molecular motion of lipid molecules in the cell membrane.