Related papers: A Generalized Theory of DNA Looping and Cyclizatio…
The importance of nonlinearities in material constitutive relations has long been appreciated in the continuum mechanics of macroscopic rods. Although the moment (torque) response to bending is almost universally linear for small deflection…
Protein-DNA complexes with loops play a fundamental role in a wide variety of cellular processes, ranging from the regulation of DNA transcription to telomere maintenance. As ubiquitous as they are, their precise in vivo properties and…
Genetic information is stored in a linear sequence of base-pairs; however, thermal fluctuations and complex DNA conformations such as folds and loops make it challenging to order genomic material for in vitro analysis. In this work, we…
The insertion of HIV and other DNA elements within genomes underpins both genetic diversity and disease when unregulated. Most of these insertions are not random and occupy specific positions within the genome but the physical mechanisms…
Many fundamental biological processes are regulated by protein-DNA complexes called {\it synaptosomes}, which possess multiple interaction sites. Despite the critical importance of synaptosomes, the mechanisms of their formation remain not…
We present a critique and extension of the mean-field approach to the mechanical pulling transition in bound polymer systems. Our model is motivated by the theoretically and experimentally important examples of adsorbed polymers and…
For a model of DNA denaturation, exponents describing the distributions of denaturated loops and unzipped end-segments are determined by exact enumeration and by Monte Carlo simulations in two and three dimensions. The loop distributions…
Single molecule experiments on single- and double stranded DNA have sparked a renewed interest in the force-extension of polymers. The extensible Freely Jointed Chain (FJC) model is frequently invoked to explain the observed behavior of…
Minuscule molecular forces can transform DNA into a structure that is elongated by more than half its original length. We demonstrate that this pronounced conformational transition is of relevance to ongoing experimental and theoretical…
We use an elastic rod model with contact to study the extension versus rotation diagrams of single supercoiled DNA molecules. We reproduce quantitatively the supercoiling response of overtwisted DNA and, using experimental data, we get an…
Enzymatic ligation is essential for the synthesis of long DNA. However, the number of ligated products exponentially decays as the DNA synthesis proceeds in a random manner. The controlling of ligation randomness is of importance to…
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…
Although mechanical properties of DNA are well characterized at the kilo base-pair range, a number of recent experiments have suggested that DNA is more flexible at shorter length scales, which correspond to the regime that is crucial for…
Molecular biology explains function of molecules by their geometrical and electronical structures that are mainly determined by utilization of quantum effects in chemistry. However, further quantum effects are not thought to play any…
When the DNA double helix is subjected to external forces it can stretch elastically to elongations reaching 100% of its natural length. These distortions, imposed at the mesoscopic or macroscopic scales, have a dramatic effect on…
The competition between toroidal and rod-like conformations as possible ground states for DNA condensation is studied as a function of the stiffness, the length of the DNA and the form of the long-range interactions between neighboring…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
We use a statistical mechanical model to study nonthermal denaturation of DNA in the presence of protein-mediated loops. We find that looping proteins which randomly link DNA bases located at a distance along the chain could cause a…
We construct a theoretical model for the dynamics of a microscale colloidal particle, modeled as an interval, moving horizontally on a DNA-coated surface, modelled as a line coated with springs that can stick to the interval. Averaging over…
We analyze the structure of DNA molecules of different organisms by using the additive Markov chain approach. Transforming nucleotide sequences into binary strings, we perform statistical analysis of the corresponding "texts". We develop…