Related papers: High-Fidelity DNA Sensing by Protein Binding Fluct…
Transcription regulation is largely governed by the profile and the dynamics of transcription factors' binding to DNA. Stochastic effects are intrinsic to this dynamics and the binding to functional sites must be controled with a certain…
Many types of peripheral and transmembrane proteins can sense and generate membrane curvature. Laterally isotropic proteins and crescent proteins with twofold rotational symmetry, such as Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs superfamily proteins, have been…
We consider two types of fluctuations in the mass-action equilibrium in protein binding networks. The first type is driven by relatively slow changes in total concentrations (copy numbers) of interacting proteins. The second type, to which…
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…
Membrane curvature sensing is essential for a diverse range of biological processes. Recent experiments have revealed that a single nanometer-sized septin protein can distinguish between membrane-coated glass beads of one micron and three…
RNA binding proteins play a crucial role in post-transcriptional gene regulation by controlling the transport, processing, and translation of their target RNAs. Post-transcriptional gene regulation leads to the differential expression of…
Even in the steady-state, the number of biomolecules in living cells fluctuates dynamically; and the frequency spectrum of this chemical fluctuation carries valuable information about the mechanism and the dynamics of the intracellular…
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…
DNA looping plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of biological processes, providing the backbone for long range interactions on DNA. Here we develop the first model for DNA looping by an arbitrarily large number of proteins and solve…
A dynamical mean-field theory is developed to analyze stochastic single-cell dynamics of gene expression. By explicitly taking account of nonequilibrium and nonadiabatic features of the DNA state fluctuation, two-time correlation functions…
Protein activation and deactivation is central to a variety of biological mechanisms, including cellular signaling and transport. Unimolecular fluorescent resonance energy transfer (FRET) probes are a class of fusion protein sensors that…
We study the effects of the sequence on the propagation of nonlinear excitations in simple models of DNA, and how those effects are modified by noise. Starting from previous results on soliton dynamics on lattices defined by aperiodic…
The equilibrium three dimensional shape of relatively short loops of DNA is studied using an elastic model that takes into account anisotropy in bending rigidities. Using a reasonable estimate for the anisotropy, it is found that cyclized…
Conformational fluctuations are believed to play an important role in the process by which transcription factor proteins locate and bind their target site on the genome of a bacterium. Using a simple model, we show that the binding time can…
Genetic stability is a key factor in maintaining, survival and reproduction of biological cells. It relies on many processes, but one of the most important is a {\it homologous recombination}, in which the repair of breaks in…
Several processes in the cell, such as gene regulation, start when key proteins recognise and bind to short DNA sequences. However, as these sequences can be hundreds of million times shorter than the genome, they are hard to find by simple…
RNA protein interactions control the fate of cellular RNAs and play an important role in gene regulation. An interdependency between such interactions allows for the implementation of logic functions in gene regulation. We investigate the…
In the course of various biological processes, specific DNA-binding proteins must find a particular target sequence/protein or a damaged site on the DNA efficiently. DNA-binding proteins perform this task based on diffusion. Yet,…
The spectrum and scale of fluctuations in protein structures affect the range of cell phenomena, including stability of protein structures or their fragments, allosteric transitions and energy transfer. The study presents a…
The role of thermal pressure fluctuation excited within tightly packaged DNA prior to ejection from protein capsid shells is discussed in a model calculation. At equilibrium before ejection we assume the DNA is folded many times into a…