  We study the mechanical properties of semiflexible polymers when the contour
length of the polymer is comparable to its persistence length. We compute the
exact average end-to-end distance and shape of the polymer for different
boundary conditions, and show that boundary effects can lead to significant
deviations from the well-known long-polymer results. We also consider the case
of stretching a uniformly charged biopolymer by an electric field, for which we
compute the average extension and the average shape, which is shown to be
trumpetlike. Our results also apply to long biopolymers when thermal
fluctuations have been smoothed out by a large applied field or force.
