Related papers: Mesoscopic Model for Free Energy Landscape Analysi…
This chapter will provide an overview of how characterizing free-energy landscapes can provide insights into the biophysical properties of DNA, as well as into the behaviour of the DNA assemblies used in the field of DNA nanotechnology. The…
Based on the direct method of molecular dynamics, the temperature dependence of energy, partition function, entropy and free energy, describing the first-order phase transition, is calculated for the classical Peyrard-Bishop-Dauxois model…
We report model calculations on DNA single strands which describe the equilibrium dynamics and kinetics of hairpin formation and melting. Modeling is at the level of single bases. Strand rigidity is described in terms of simple polymer…
Simple mechanical models of DNA play an important role in studying the dynamics of its open states. The main requirement when developing a DNA model is the correct selection of its effective potentials and parameters based on experimental…
We investigate the thermodynamics and kinetics of DNA hairpins that fold/unfold under the action of applied mechanical force. We introduce the concept of the molecular free energy landscape and derive simplified expressions for the force…
While the behavior of double stranded DNA at mesoscopic scales is fairly well understood, less is known about its relation to the rich mechanical properties in the base-pair scale, which is crucial, for instance, to understand DNA-protein…
Nucleic acids physical properties have been investigated by theoretical methods based both on fully atomistic representations and on coarse grained models, e.g. the worm-like-chain, taken from polymer physics. In this article, I present an…
This paper presents a numerical study of the dynamics of DNA double helix breakage under the influence of external forces using the Peyrard-Bishop-Dauxois (PBD) model. The PBD model represents DNA as a chain of nonlinearly coupled…
We study energy localization on the oscillator-chain proposed by Peyrard and Bishop to model the DNA. We search numerically for conditions with initial energy in a small subgroup of consecutive oscillators of a finite chain and such that…
We study the features on the unzipping process of a modified version of the Peyrard-Bishop- Dauxois model. We show that the inclusion of a barrier in the on-site potential allows for the existence of stable domain wall solutions between…
Specific binding of proteins to DNA is one of the most common ways in which gene expression is controlled. Although general rules for the DNA-protein recognition can be derived, the ambiguous and complex nature of this mechanism precludes a…
The local opening of DNA is an intriguing phenomenon from a statistical physics point of view, but is also essential for its biological function. For instance, the transcription and replication of our genetic code can not take place without…
We recently proposed a dynamical mesoscopic model for DNA, which is based, like statistical ones, on site-dependent finite stacking and pairing enthalpies. In the present article, we first describe how the parameters of this model are…
We use nucleosome maps obtained by high-throughput sequencing to study sequence specificity of intrinsic histone-DNA interactions. In contrast with previous approaches, we employ an analogy between a classical one-dimensional fluid of…
We present a method to obtain numerically accurate values of configurational free energies of semiflexible macromolecular systems, based on the technique of thermodynamic integration combined with normal-mode analysis of a reference system…
It has recently been discovered that many biological systems, when represented as graphs, exhibit a scale-free topology. One such system is the set of structural relationships among protein domains. The scale-free nature of this and other…
We study DNA denaturation by integrating elasticity -- as described by the Gaussian network model -- with bond binding energies, distinguishing between different base-pair and stacking energies. We use exact calculation, within the model,…
The knowledge of the Free Energy Landscape topology is the essential key to understand many biochemical processes. The determination of the conformers of a protein and their basins of attraction takes a central role for studying molecular…
We study the thermal and mechanical behavior of DNA denaturation in the frame of the mesoscopic Peyrard- Bishop-Dauxois model with the inclusion of solvent interaction. By analyzing the melting transition of a homogeneous A-T sequence, we…
Coarse-grained models have played an important role in the study of the behavior of DNA at length scales beyond a few hundred base pairs. Traditionally, these models have relied on structurally featureless and sequence-independent…