Related papers: Length scale dependence of DNA mechanical properti…
In this work we investigate the electronic transport along model DNA molecules using an effective tight-binding approach that includes the backbone on site energies. The localization length and participation number are examined as a…
The simplest model of DNA mechanics describes the double helix as a continuous rod with twist and bend elasticity. Recent work has discussed the relevance of a little-studied coupling $G$ between twisting and bending, known to arise from…
Nucleic acids have been regarded as stiff polymers with long-range flexibility and generally modeled using elastic rod models of polymer physics. Notwithstanding, investigations carried out over the past few years on single fragments of…
The approach for the description of the DNA conformational transformations on the mesoscopic scales in the frame of the double helix is presented. Due to consideration of the joint motions of DNA structural elements along the conformational…
Herein it is shown that in order to study the statistical properties of DNA sequences in bacterial chromosomes it suffices to consider only one half of the chromosome because they are similar to its corresponding complementary sequence in…
Cooperativity plays an important role in the action of proteins bound to DNA. A simple, mechanical mechanism for cooperativity, in the form of a tension-mediated interaction between proteins bound to DNA at two different locations is…
Within a simple elastic theory, we study the elongation versus force characteristics of a supercoiled DNA molecule at thermal equilibrium in the regime of small supercoiling. The partition function is mapped to the path integral…
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…
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…
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…
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…
As a key molecule of Life, Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the focus of numbers of investigations with the help of biological, chemical and physical techniques. From a physical point of view, both experimental and theoretical works have…
A theoretical framework for evaluating the approximate energy and dynamic properties associated with the folding of DNA into nucleosomes and chromatin is presented. For this purpose experimentally determined elastic constants of linear DNA…
Several recent experiments suggest that sharply bent DNA has a surprisingly high bending flexibility, but the cause of this flexibility is poorly understood. Although excitation of flexible defects can explain these results, whether such…
The binding of proteins onto DNA contributes to the shaping and packaging of genome as well as to the expression of specific genetic messages. With a view to understanding the interplay between the presence of proteins and the deformation…
The theory of elastic rods can be used to describe certain geometric and topological properties of the DNA molecules. A similar effective field theory approach was previously suggested to describe the conformations and dynamics of proteins.…
We present an elastic model of B-form DNA as a stack of thin, rigid plates or base pairs that are not permitted to deform. The symmetry of DNA and the constraint of plate rigidity limit the number of bulk elastic constants contributing to a…
We present a new dynamical model of DNA. This model has two degrees of freedom per base-pair: one radial variable related to the opening of the hydrogen bonds and an angular one related to the twisting of each base-pair responsible for the…
We study the basepairing dynamics of DNA with repetitive sequences where local strand slippage can create, annihilate, and move bulge loops. Using an explicit theoretical model, we find a rich dynamical behavior as a function of an applied…
We present a generic model for DNA at the base-pair level. We use a variant of the Gay-Berne potential to represent the stacking energy between neighboring base-pairs. The sugar-phosphate backbones are taken into account by semi-rigid…