Fig. 8: Experimental results for a cavity confined plasmid in presence of T₄-DNA with added macro crowders.

a Plasmid probability density in cavity, obtained from histogrammed plasmid position measurements, with and without crowding and for a symmetric and anisotropic cavity. The crowder volume fraction is v_ϕ = 6.3 ⋅ 10⁻² and the scale bars are 1 μm. The red dashed line gives the cavity edge. b Cross-section of the plasmid position probability along the cavity major axis (upper panel) and along the cavity minor axis (lower panel). The length of the semi-major axis of the cavity is 1.51 μm. The length of the semi-minor axis of the cavity is 0.66 μm. The error bars denote the standard error of the mean of the binned probability density (n = 3 bins). c Radially averaged plasmid probability density. The inset shows the contour along which the probability density average is taken. d Plasmid probability density averaged over an elliptical contour versus effective radial coordinate \(r_{{{{{\rm{eff}}}}}}={\sqrt{\frac{x^2}{a^2}+\frac{y^2}{b^2}}}\), where a and b correspond to the length of semi-major and semi-minor axis respectively. The inset shows the elliptical contours along which the probability density average is taken.