Related papers: Colloidal Flying Carpets
Concentrated solutions of short blunt-ended DNA duplexes, down to 6 base pairs, are known to order into the nematic liquid crystal phase. This self-assembly is due to the stacking interactions between the duplex terminals that promotes…
We determine the phase diagram of DNA with inter- and intra-strand native-pair interactions that mimic the compaction of DNA. We show that DNA takes an overall sheet-like structure in the region where an incipient transition to a compact…
While stretching of most polymer chains leads to rather featureless force-extension diagrams, some, notably DNA, exhibit non-trivial behavior with a distinct plateau region. Here we propose a unified theory that connects force-extension…
The genomic DNA of bacteria occupies only a fraction of the cell called the nucleoid, although it is not bounded by any membrane and would occupy a volume hundreds of times larger than the cell in the absence of constraints. The two most…
DNA adsorption on solid or liquid surfaces is a topic of broad fundamental and applied interest. Here we study by x-ray reflectivity the adsorption of monodisperse double-stranded DNA molecules a positively-charged surface, obtained through…
This paper aims at a comprehensive understanding on the novel elastic property of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) discovered very recently through single-molecule manipulation techniques. A general elastic model for double-stranded biopolymers…
The use of colloidal supported lipid bilayers (CSLBs) has recently been extended to create colloidal joints, that - in analogy to their macroscopic counterparts - can flexibly connect colloidal particles. These novel elements enable the…
The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena that cover such…
In the self-assembly process which drives the formation of cellular membranes, micelles, and capsids, a collection of separated subunits spontaneously binds together to form functional and more ordered structures. In this work, we study the…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
We characterize the self-assembly of colloidal particles with surface mobile DNA linkers under kinetically limited valence conditions. For this, we put forward a computer simulation model that captures quantitatively the interplay between…
Our study aims at a better control and understanding of the transfer of a complex [DNA supercoiled plasmid - dodecyltrimethylammonium surfactant] layer from a liquid-vapour water interface onto a silicon surface without any additional…
Recent experimental and theoretical approaches have attempted to quantify the physical organization (compaction and geometry) of the bacterial chromosome with its complement of proteins (the nucleoid). The genomic DNA exists in a complex…
Molecular electronics and other technologies whose components comprise individual molecules have been pursued for half a century because the molecular scale represents the limit of miniaturisation of objects whose structure is tuneable for…
We use a coarse-grained molecular model to study the self-assembly process of complexes of cationic and neutral lipids with DNA molecules ("lipoplexes") - a promising nonviral carrier of DNA for gene therapy. We identify the resulting…
DNA condensation by multivalent cations plays a crucial role in genome packaging in viruses and sperm heads, and has been extensively studied using single-molecule experimental methods. In those experiments, the values of the critical…
The chromosomal DNA of bacteria is folded into a compact body called the nucleoid, which is composed essentially of DNA (80%), RNA (10%), and a number of different proteins (10%). These nucleoid proteins act as regulators of gene expression…
We report small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments on aqueous dispersions of colloidal silica with a broad monomodal size distribution (polydispersity 18%, size 8 nm). Over a range of volume fractions the silica particles segregate…
We study DNA self-assembly and DNA computation using a coarse-grained DNA model within the directional dynamic bonding framework {[}C. Svaneborg, Comp. Phys. Comm. 183, 1793 (2012){]}. In our model, a single nucleotide or domain is…
DNA supercoiling is central to many fundamental processes of living organisms. Its average level along the chromosome and over time reflects the dynamic equilibrium of opposite activities of topoisomerases, which are required to relax…