Related papers: Thermodynamic pathways to genome spatial organizat…
The organization of cells within tissues plays a vital role in various biological processes, including development and morphogenesis. As a result, understanding how cells self-organize in tissues has been an active area of research. In our…
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) represent an important type of dynamic sites within the human genome. These common variants often locally correlate into more complex multi-SNP haploblocks that are maintained throughout generations in…
Cells integrate signals and make decisions about their future state in short amounts of time. A lot of theoretical effort has gone into asking how to best design gene regulatory circuits that fulfill a given function, yet little is known…
Magnetic tweezers are used to study the mechanical response under torsion of single nucleosome arrays reconstituted on tandem repeats of 5S positioning sequences. Regular arrays are extremely resilient and can reversibly accommodate a large…
The approach for the description of the DNA conformational transformations on the mesoscopic scales in the frame of the double helix is presented. Due to consideration of the joint motions of DNA structural elements along the conformational…
Capturing the physical organisation and dynamics of genomic regions is one of the major open challenges in biology. The kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) is a topologically complex genome, made by thousands of DNA (mini and maxi) circles interlinked…
Thermodynamics entails a set of mathematical conditions on quantum Markovian dynamics. In particular, strict energy conservation between the system and environment implies that the dissipative dynamical map commutes with the unitary system…
The sustenance of life depends on the high degree of organization that prevails through different levels of living organisms, from subcellular structures such as biomolecular complexes and organelles to tissues and organs. The physical…
Connectomes are spatially embedded networks whose architecture has been shaped by physical constraints and communication needs throughout evolution. Using a decentralized navigation protocol, we investigate the relationship between the…
In prokaryotic genomes the number of transcriptional regulators is known to quadratically scale with the total number of protein-coding genes. Toolbox model was recently proposed to explain this scaling for metabolic enzymes and their…
We perform molecular-dynamics simulations of a molecular system in supercooled states for different values of inertia parameters to provide evidence that the long-time dynamics depends only on the equilibrium structure. This observation is…
This article presents a physical biology approach to understanding organization and segregation of bacterial chromosomes. The author uses a "piston" analogy for bacterial chromosomes in a cell, which leads to a phase diagram for the…
Our aim is to predict how often genic and non-genic promoters fire within a cell. We first review a parsimonious pan-genomic model for genome organization and gene regulation, where transcription rate is determined by proximity in 3D space…
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…
Computational models have become an essential part of exploratory protocols in cell biology, as a complement to in vivo or in vitro experiments. These virtual models have the twofold advantage of enabling access to new types of data and…
We propose a new statistical mechanics model for the melting transition of DNA. Base pairing and stacking are treated as separate degrees of freedom, and the interplay between pairing and stacking is described by a set of local rules which…
Within the nucleus, structural maintenance of chromosome protein complexes, namely condensin and cohesin, create an architecture to facilitate the organization and proper function of the genome. Condensin, in addition to performing loop…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes that bind at distal DNA sites plays a central role in many cellular processes, such as transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review the basic thermodynamic…
The dynamical characterization of proteins is crucial to understand protein function. From a microscopic point of view, protein dynamics is governed by the local atomic interactions that, in turn, trigger the functional conformational…