Related papers: Non-specific DNA-protein interaction: Why proteins…
Strong influence of water molecules on the transport and magnetic properties of DNA, observed in this study, opens up real opportunities for application of DNA in molecular electronics. Interaction of the nucleobases with water molecules…
It is a standard exercise in mechanical engineering to infer the external forces and torques on a body from its static shape and known elastic properties. Here we apply this kind of analysis to distorted double-helical DNA in complexes with…
The adsorption of DNA or other polyelectrolyte molecules on charged membranes is a recurrent motif in soft matter and bionanotechnological systems. Two typical situations encountered are the deposition of single DNA chains onto substrates…
The effective DNA-DNA interaction force is calculated by computer simulations with explicit tetravalent counterions and monovalent salt. For overcharged DNA molecules, the interaction force shows a double-minimum structure. The positions…
Fluorescence microscopy reveals that the contents of many (membrane-free) nuclear "bodies" exchange rapidly with the soluble pool whilst the underlying structure persists; such observations await a satisfactory biophysical explanation. To…
The mechanism behind mutual recognition of homologous DNA sequences prior to genetic recombination is one of the remaining puzzles in molecular biology. Leading models of homology recognition, based on classical electrostatics, neglect the…
The effective interaction between two parallel strands of helical bio-molecules, such as deoxyribose nucleic acids (DNA), is calculated using computer simulations of the "primitive" model of electrolytes. In particular we study a simple…
The binding of proteins onto DNA contributes to the shaping and packaging of genome as well as to the expression of specific genetic messages. With a view to understanding the interplay between the presence of proteins and the deformation…
The speed of site-specific binding of transcription factor (TFs) proteins with genomic DNA seems to be strongly retarded by the randomly occurring sequence traps. Traps are those DNA sequences sharing significant similarity with the…
The effect of electrostatic interactions on the stretching of DNA is investigated using a simple worm like chain model. In the limit of small force there are large conformational fluctuations which are treated using a self-consistent…
We present the first proof-of-concept simulations of detectors using biomaterials to detect particle interactions. The essential idea behind a "DNA detector" involves the attachment of a forest of precisely-sequenced single or…
We investigate the dynamics of DNA translocation through a nanopore driven by an external force using Langevin dynamics simulations in two dimensions (2D) to study how the translocation dynamics depend on the details of the DNA sequences.…
Organization and maintenance of the chromosomal DNA in living cells strongly depends on the DNA interactions with a plethora of DNA-binding proteins. Single-molecule studies show that formation of nucleoprotein complexes on DNA by such…
The possibility that the sliding motion of proteins on DNA is influenced by the base sequence through a base pair reading interaction, is considered. Referring to the case of the T7 RNA-polymerase, we show that the protein should follow a…
We study the impact of DNA coiling on the search rate of proteins moving along the DNA contour interspersed by three-dimensional (3D) bulk excursions. When the DNA is coiled proteins performing short 3D hops along a DNA segment can be…
The three-dimensional organization of chromatin is thought to play an important role in controlling gene expression. Specificity in expression is achieved through the interaction of transcription factors and other nuclear proteins with…
There is increasing evidence that protein binding to specific sites along DNA can activate the reading out of genetic information without coming into direct physical contact with the gene. There also is evidence that these distant but…
We suggest to discriminate single DNA bases via transverse ionic transport, namely by detecting the ionic current that flows in a channel while a single-stranded DNA is driven through an intersecting nanochannel. Our all-atom molecular…
The problem of DNA-DNA interaction mediated by divalent counterions is studied using computer simulation. Although divalent counterions cannot condense free DNA molecules in solution, we show that if DNA configurational entropy is…
The Histone-like Nucleoid Structuring protein (H-NS) is a nucleoid-associated protein, which is involved in both gene regulation and DNA compaction. H-NS can bind to DNA in two different ways: in trans, by binding to two separate DNA…