Deformation response of a two-dimensional polymer

Kinetoplast DNA is the mitochondrial DNA of trypanosomes and related parasites. A kinetoplast is a complex two-dimensional network of topologically interlinked circular DNA. There has been much interest in studying the kinetoplast from a microbiology point of view, but little is known about the material properties of the network structure. The stretching response of a one-dimensional linear polymer has been studied extensively using single-molecule experiments. In this work, we probe experimentally the deformation response of the kinetoplast as a model two-dimensional polymer. We subject kinetoplasts to planar elongational fields in microfluidic channels and study the dynamics of kinetoplasts under a constant strain rate, as well as the relaxation dynamics of kinetoplasts.