Related papers: Macroscopic loop formation in circular DNA denatur…
DNA supercoiling, the under or overwinding of DNA, is a key physical mechanism both participating to compaction of bacterial genomes and making genomic sequences adopt various structural forms. DNA supercoiling may lead to the formation of…
We study the dynamics of DNA hairpin formation using oxDNA, a nucleotide-level coarse-grained model of DNA. In particular, we explore the effects of the loop stacking interactions and non-native base pairing on the hairpin closing times. We…
The twisting deformation of mechanically stretched DNA molecules is studied by a coarse grained Hamiltonian model incorporating the fundamental interactions that stabilize the double helix and accounting for the radial and angular base pair…
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…
The spatial organization of DNA involves DNA loop extrusion and the formation of protein-DNA condensates. While the significance of each process is increasingly recognized, their interplay remains unexplored. Using molecular dynamics…
Biological information is not only stored in the digital chemical sequence of double helical DNA, but is also encoded in the mechanical properties of the DNA strands, which can influence biochemical processes involving its readout. For…
We study the folding of RNA secondary structures with quenched sequence randomness by means of the constrained annealing method. A thermodynamic phase transition is induced by including the conformational weight of loop structures. In…
We study the thermodynamic and dynamic behaviors of twist-induced denaturation bubbles in a long, stretched random sequence of DNA. The small bubbles associated with weak twist are delocalized. Above a threshold torque, the bubbles of…
The base pair fluctuations and helix untwisting are examined for a circular molecule. A realistic mesoscopic model including twisting degrees of freedom and bending of the molecular axis is proposed. The computational method, based on path…
The thermodynamical properties of heterogeneous DNA sequences are computed by path integral techniques applied to a nonlinear model Hamiltonian. The base pairs relative displacements are interpreted as time dependent paths whose amplitudes…
We predict a novel temperature-driven phase transition of DNA below the melting transition. The additional, intermediate phase exists for repetitive sequences, when the two strands have different lengths. In this phase, the excess bases of…
By extending the classical Peyrard-Bishop model, we are able to obtain a fully analytical description for the mechanical resistance of DNA under stretching at variable values of temperature, number of base pairs and intrachains and…
Multistep denaturation in a short circular DNA molecule is analyzed by a mesoscopic Hamiltonian model which accounts for the helicoidal geometry. Computation of melting profiles by the path integral method suggests that stacking…
We present detailed molecular dynamics results for the displacement autocorrelation spectra of the Peyrard-Bishop model of thermal DNA denaturation. As the phase transition is approached, the spectra depend on whether the wavelength is…
The melting transition of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), whereby the strands of the double helix structure completely separate at a certain temperature, has been characterized using neutron scattering. A Bragg peak from B-form fibre DNA has…
We introduce a three-state model for a single DNA chain under tension that distinguishes between B-DNA, S-DNA and M (molten or denatured) segments and at the same time correctly accounts for the entropy of molten loops, characterized by the…
By combining analytical and numerical calculations, we investigate the minimal-energy shape of short DNA loops of approximately $100$ base pairs (bp). We show that in these loops the excess twist density oscillates as a response to an…
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…
A statistical model of homopolymer DNA, coupling internal base pair states (unbroken or broken) and external thermal chain fluctuations, is exactly solved using transfer kernel techniques. The dependence on temperature and DNA length of the…
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…