Related papers: DNA nano-mechanics: how proteins deform the double…
Three coarse-grained models of the double-stranded DNA are proposed and compared in the context of mechanical manipulation such as twisting and various schemes of stretching. The models differ in the number of effective beads (between two…
Recent advances in operating and manipulating DNA have provided unique experimental possibilities in many fields of DNA research, especially in gene therapy. Researchers have deployed many techniques, experimental and theoretical, to study…
Electrical forces are the background of all the interactions occurring in biochemical systems. From here and by using a combination of ab-initio and ad-hoc models, we introduce the first description of electric field profiles with intrabond…
We study the effects of the shear force on the rupture mechanism on a double stranded DNA. Motivated by recent experiments, we perform the atomistic simulations with explicit solvent to obtain the distributions of extension in hydrogen and…
The percentage and sequence of AT and GC base pairs and charges on the DNA backbone contribute significantly to the stiffness of DNA. This elastic property of DNA also changes with small interacting ligands. The single-molecule force…
This paper introduces the use of cable dynamics models as a means to explore the mechanics of DNA on long-length scales. It is on these length scales that DNA forms twisted and curved three-dimensional shapes known as supercoils and loops.…
The histone-DNA interaction in the nucleosome is a fundamental mechanism of genomic compaction and regulation, which remains largely unkown despite a growing structural knowledge of the complex. Here, we propose a framework for the…
The sequence-dependent structural variability and conformational dynamics of DNA play pivotal roles in many biological milieus, such as in the site-specific binding of transcription factors to target regulatory elements. To better…
The structure of DNA Binding Proteins enables a strong interaction with their specific target site on DNA. However, recent single molecule experiment reported that proteins can diffuse on DNA. This suggests that the interactions between…
DNA nanotechnology uses predictable interactions of nucleic acids to precisely engineer complex nanostructures. Characterizing these self-assembled structures at the single-structure level is crucial for validating their design and…
For most of the important processes in DNA metabolism, a protein has to reach a specific binding site on the DNA. The specific binding site may consist of just a few base pairs while the DNA is usually several millions of base pairs long.…
We explore in detail the structural, mechanical and thermodynamic properties of a coarse-grained model of DNA similar to that introduced in Thomas E. Ouldridge, Ard A. Louis, Jonathan P.K. Doye, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104 178101 (2010). Effective…
How a nano-searcher finds its nano-target is a general problem in non-equilibrium statistical physics. It becomes vital when the searcher is a damaged DNA fragment trying to find its counterpart on the intact homologous chromosome. If the…
We study unzipping of a complementary RNA-DNA helix applied to an external force, focusing on the force-force correlations. While at the microscopic level these are given by the sequence, the experiment measures effective, macroscopic…
The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core particle is studied using an elastic model that incorporates anisotropy in the bending energetics and twist-bend coupling. Using the experimentally determined structure of nucleosomal DNA [T.J.…
We consider voltage-driving DNA translocation through a nanopore in the present study. By assuming the DNA is coaxial with the cylindrical nanopore, a hydrodynamic model for determining effective force on a single DNA molecule in a nanopore…
Several recent experiments suggest that sharply bent DNA has a surprisingly high bending flexibility, but the cause of this flexibility is poorly understood. Although excitation of flexible defects can explain these results, whether such…
We study the elastic response of a worm-like polymer chain with reversible kink-like structural defects. This is a generic model for (a) the double-stranded DNA with sharp bends induced by binding of certain proteins, and (b) effects of…
We present a study on the role of defects on the stability of short DNA molecules. We consider short DNA molecules (16 base pairs) and investigate the thermal as well as mechanical denaturation of these molecules in the presence of defects…
Solid-state nanopore DNA sequencers present mechanical and chemical stability, reusability, and large-scale integrability. However, their development is hindered by the absence of a protein-free mechanism for controlling DNA translocation,…