Related papers: Twist solitons in complex macromolecules: from DNA…
Polymer composites are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, owing to their emergent desirable mechanical properties not attainable in single-species systems. At the same time, polymer topology has been shown to play a key role in…
We investigate the sequence-dependent behaviour of localised excitations in a toy, nonlinear model of DNA base-pair opening originally proposed by Salerno. Specifically we ask whether ``breather'' solitons could play a role in the…
Bacterial genomes are partitioned into kilobases long domains that are topologically independent from each other, meaning that change of DNA superhelicity in one domain does not propagate to neighbours. This is made possible by proteins…
Stochastic modeling of transcription is a classic yet long-standing problem in theoretical biophysics. The lack of unified results and a computationally efficient approach for a general, fine-grained transcription model has confined…
The folding of RNA and DNA strands plays crucial roles in biological systems and bionanotechnology. However, studying these processes with high-resolution numerical models is beyond current computational capabilities due to the timescales…
Replication and transcription are two important processes in living systems. To execute such processes, various proteins work far away from equilibrium in a staggered way. Motivated by this, aspects of hysteresis during unzipping of DNA…
We analyze the dynamics of structural transitions between normal right-handed B form and unusual left-handed Z form for a linear DNA molecule. The dynamics under the external torque in physiological buffer is modeled by a Langevin equation,…
We propose a dynamical model for the secondary structure of DNA, which is based on the finite stacking enthalpies used in thermodynamics calculations. In this model, the two strands can separate and the bases are allowed to rotate…
Transcription is a complex phenomenon that permits the conversion of genetic information into phenotype by means of an enzyme called RNA polymerase, which erratically moves along and scans the DNA template. We perform Bayesian inference…
Driven dissipative systems at ambient conditions typically exhibit continuous responses shaped by fluctuations and relaxation, with discrete macroscopic states arising only under specific dynamical constraints. Here, we report the emergence…
The interplay between bending of the molecule axis and appearance of disruptions in circular DNA molecules, with $\sim 100$ base pairs, is addressed. Three minicircles with different radii and almost equal content of AT and GC pairs are…
By resorting to a model inspired to the standard Davydov and Holstein-Fr\"ohlich models, in the present paper we study the motion of an electron along a chain of heavy particles modelling a sequence of nucleotides proper to a DNA fragment.…
We study the spontaneous ''sliding'' of histone spools (nucleosomes) along DNA as a result of thermally activated single base pair twist defects. To this end we map the system onto a suitably extended Frenkel-Kontorova model. Combining…
We present micro-rheological measurments of the drag force on colloids pulled through a solution of lambda-DNA (used here as a monodisperse model polymer) with an optical tweezer. The experiments show a violation of the Stokes-Einstein…
Efficient capture and detection of minute amount of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules are pivotal for an array of modern gene technologies which are widely utilized in medical, forensic and defense applications, including DNA…
We study a class of micromanipulation experiments, exemplified by the pulling apart of the two strands of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA). When the pulling force is increased to a critical value, an ``unzipping'' transition occurs. For random…
DNA nanotechnology promises to provide controllable self-assembly on the nanoscale, allowing for the design of static structures, dynamic machines and computational architectures. In this article I review the state-of-the art of DNA…
Understanding molecular structure, dynamics, and reactivity requires bridging processes that occur across widely separated time scales. Conventional molecular dynamics simulations provide atomistic resolution, but their femtosecond time…
We present a self-contained theory for the mechanical response of DNA in single molecule experiments. Our model is based on a 1D continuum description of the DNA molecule and accounts both for its elasticity and for DNA-DNA electrostatic…
We introduce a coarse-grained model of DNA with bases modeled as rigid-body ellipsoids to capture their anisotropic stereochemistry. Interaction potentials are all physicochemical and generated from all-atom simulation/parameterization with…