Related papers: Tops and Writhing DNA
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
Harnessing the topology of ring polymers as a design motif in functional nanomaterials is becoming a promising direction in the field of soft matter. For example, the ring topology of DNA plasmids prevents the relaxation of excess twist…
Polymers exposed to shear flow exhibit a rich tumbling dynamics. While rigid rods rotate on Jeffery orbits, flexible polymers stretch and coil up during tumbling. Theoretical results show that in both of these asymptotic regimes the…
DNA bending on length scales shorter than a persistence length plays an integral role in the translation of genetic information from DNA to cellular function. Quantitative experimental studies of these biological systems have led to a…
DNA translocation through nanopores is one of the most promising strategies for the next-generation sequencing technologies. Most part of experimental and numerical works has focused on polymer translocation biased by electrophoresis, where…
Here we present a systematic study of supercoil formation in DNA minicircles under varying linking number by using molecular dynamics simulations of a two-bead coarse-grained model. Our model is designed with the purpose of simulating long…
Nanoparticles tethered with DNA strands are promising building blocks for bottom-up nanotechnology, and a theoretical understanding is important for future development. Here we build on approaches developed in polymer physics to provide…
We present micro-rheological measurments of the drag force on colloids pulled through a solution of lambda-DNA (used here as a monodisperse model polymer) with an optical tweezer. The experiments show a violation of the Stokes-Einstein…
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…
Exploiting the "natural" frame of space curves, we formulate an intrinsic dynamics of twisted elastic filaments in viscous fluids. A pair of coupled nonlinear equations describing the temporal evolution of the filament's complex curvature…
Kinetic theory and thermodynamics are applied to DNA polymerases with exonuclease activity, taking into account the dependence of the rates on the previously incorportated nucleotide. The replication fidelity is shown to increase…
DNA supercoiling plays an important role in a variety of cellular processes. The torsional stress related with supercoiling may be also involved in gene regulation through the local structure and dynamics of the double helix. To check this…
Loops undergoing thermal fluctuations are prevalent in nature. Ring-like or cross-linked polymers, cyclic macromolecules, and protein-mediated DNA loops all belong to this category. Stability of these molecules are generally described in…
Short DNA linkers are increasingly being exploited for driving specific self-assembly of Brownian objects. DNA-functionalised colloids can assemble into ordered or amorphous materials with tailored morphology. Recently, the same approach…
When double stranded DNA is turned in experiments it undergoes a transition. We use an interacting self-avoiding walk on a three-dimensional fcc lattice weighted by writhe to relate to these experiments and treat this problem via…
We study numerically the mechanical stability and elasticity properties of duplex DNA molecules within the frame of a network model incorporating microscopic degrees of freedom related with the arrangement of the base pairs. We pay special…
To go beyond the simple model for the fold as two flexible surfaces or faces linked by a crease that behaves as an elastic hinge, we carefully shape and anneal a crease within a polymer sheet and study its mechanical response. First, we…
We establish a framework for assessing whether the transition state location of a biopolymer, which can be inferred from single molecule pulling experiments, corresponds to the ensemble of structures that have equal probability of reaching…
Increasing evidence suggests that chromosome folding and genetic expression are intimately connected. For example, the co-expression of a large number of genes can benefit from their spatial co-localization in the cellular space.…
The symmetries of the DNA double helix require a new term in its linear response to stress: the coupling between twist and stretch. Recent experiments with torsionally-constrained single molecules give the first direct measurement of this…