Related papers: The size of the nucleosome
A theory of the unzipping of double-stranded (ds) DNA is presented, and is compared to recent micromanipulation experiments. It is shown that the interactions which stabilize the double helix and the elastic rigidity of single strands (ss)…
The behavior of long DNA molecules in a cell-sized confined space was investigated. We prepared water-in-oil droplets covered by phospholipids, which mimic the inner space of a cell, following the encapsulation of DNA molecules with…
DNA storage has emerged as an important area of research. The reliability of DNA storage system depends on designing the DNA strings (called DNA codes) that are sufficiently dissimilar. In this work, we introduce DNA codes that satisfy a…
For short DNA molecules in crowded environments, we evaluate macroscopic parameters such as the average end-to-end distance and the twist conformation by tuning the strength of the site specific confinement driven by the crowders. The…
The strength of the spin-orbit interaction relevant to transport in a low dimensional structure depends critically on the relative geometrical arrangement of current carrying orbitals. Recent tight-binding orbital models for spin transport…
The biggest challenge when using DNA as a storage medium is maintaining its stability. The relative occurrence of Guanine (G) and Cytosine (C) is essential for the longevity of DNA. In addition to that, reverse complementary base pairs…
DNA is subject to large deformations in a wide range of biological processes. Two key examples illustrate how such deformations influence the readout of the genetic information: the sequestering of eukaryotic genes by nucleosomes, and DNA…
DNA is an ideal candidate to organize matter on the nanoscale, primarily due to the specificity and complexity of DNA based interactions. Recent advances in this direction include the self-assembly of colloidal crystals using DNA grafted…
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…
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…
DNA nanotubes are tubular structures composed of DNA crossover molecules. We present a bottom up approach for construction and characterization of these structures. Various possible topologies of nanotubes are constructed such as 6-helix,…
The histone-DNA interaction in the nucleosome is a fundamental mechanism of genomic compaction and regulation, which remains largely unkown despite a growing structural knowledge of the complex. Here, we propose a framework for the…
Chromatin moves dynamically inside the cell nucleus, and its motion is often correlated with gene functions such as DNA recombination and transcription. A recent study has shown that during early embryogenesis of the nematode,…
While bacterial chromosomes were long thought to be amorphous, recent experiments reveal pronounced organizational features. However, the extent of bacterial chromosome organization remains unclear. Here, we develop a fully data-driven…
Nanoscale chromatin domains, variously termed nucleosome clutches, nanodomains, or packing domains, have emerged as fundamental architectural units of the mammalian genome during interphase and mitosis. Unlike cohesin-dependent loops or…
We present a theoretical analysis of the structural and mechanical properties of the 30-nm chromatin fiber. Our study is based on the two-angle model introduced by Woodcock et al. (Woodcock, C. L., S. A. Grigoryev, R. A. Horowitz, and N.…
In this work we report the study of conformation dependent electronic transport properties of DNA double-helix within tight-binding framework including its helical symmetry. We have studied the changes in localization properties of DNA as…
The volume occupied by unconstrained bacterial DNA in physiological solutions exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Still, it is confined to a well defined region of the cell called the nucleoid, which occupies only a fraction of the…
We present Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations of the stretching of a single 30 nm chromatin fiber. The model approximates the DNA by a flexible polymer chain with Debye-H\"uckel electrostatics and uses a two-angle zig-zag model for the geometry…
We propose that the degree of sweeling of the 30nm chromatin fiber (a "measure" of its transcriptional activity) is mainly determined by the short-ranged electrostatical interaction between different sections of the "folded" DNA chain.…