The structural determination and manipulation of bottle-brush polymers, a class of polymers with serially grafted side-chains, is challenging due to the interplay of side-chain and backbone interactions over various length scales. The present work performs a detailed analysis, using molecular dynamics simulation techniques, to unravel these interactions by probing the distinct rod to a flexible real-chain with self-avoiding walk (SAW) type crossover in the backbone static structure factor. This analysis elucidates the deviation from flexible chain behavior, while also providing a quantitative measure of persistence length, lp. Significantly, the results identify a trend in lp which is consistent with the debated theoretical prediction of lp Ns 15/8, where Ns is the number of monomers in each side-chain of the bottle-brush polymer. (Figure presented.). © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim