Related papers: Template-directed biopolymerization: tape-copying …
Molecular chaperones are machines that consume copious amount of ATP to drive misfolded proteins or RNA to fold into functionally competent native states. Because the folding landscapes of biomolecules with complex native state topology are…
Rotary motors play key roles in energy transduction, from macroscale windmills to nanoscale turbines such as ATP synthase in cells. Despite our capabilities to construct engines at many scales, developing functional synthetic turbines at…
We study a class of micromanipulation experiments, exemplified by the pulling apart of the two strands of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA). When the pulling force is increased to a critical value, an ``unzipping'' transition occurs. For random…
The manipulation of nanoscale matter has the potential to revolutionize a variety of fields across nanoscience and technology. Here, we demonstrate experimentally and characterize numerically a device that combines the benefits of…
DNA replication fidelity is a critical issue in molecular biology. Biochemical experiments have provided key insights on the mechanism of fidelity control by DNAP in the past decades, whereas systematic theoretical studies on this issue…
Proteins are polymers of amino acids. These macromolecules are synthesized by intracellular machines called ribosomes. Although the experimental investigation of protein synthesis has been a traditional area of research in molecular cell…
Life is confronted with computation problems in a variety of domains including animal behavior, single-cell behavior, and embryonic development. Yet we currently do not know of a naturally existing biological system that is capable of…
Organization and maintenance of the chromosomal DNA in living cells strongly depends on the DNA interactions with a plethora of DNA-binding proteins. Single-molecule studies show that formation of nucleoprotein complexes on DNA by such…
The activity of biological cells is primarily based on chemical reactions and typically modeled as a reaction-diffusion system. Cells are, however, highly crowded with macromolecules, including a variety of molecular machines such as…
A methodology for the statistical mechanical analysis of polymeric chains under tension introduced previously is extended to include torque. The response of individual bonds between monomers or of entire groups of monomers to a combination…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Linear bio-molecular motors move unidirectionally along a track by coordinating several different processes, such as fuel (ATP) capture, hydrolysis, conformational changes, binding and unbinding from a track, and center-of-mass diffusion. A…
Recent experiments showed that multiple copies of the molecular machine RNA polymerase (RNAP) can efficiently synthesize mRNA collectively in the active state of the promoter. However, environmentally-induced promoter repression results in…
With the progressive scale-down of semiconductor's feature size, people are looking forward to More Moore and More than Moore. In order to offer a possible alternative implementation process, people are trying to figure out a feasible…
Understanding and controlling the rheology of polymeric complex fluids that are pushed out-of-equilibrium is a fundamental problem in both industry and biology. For example, to package, repair, and replicate DNA, cells use enzymes to…
Emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences is a major question in the study of origins of life. To answer this, we studied a model polymerization reaction, where polymers are synthesized by stepwise ligation from two types…
We present an atomistic study of heterogeneous nucleation in Ni employing transition path sampling, which reveals a template precursor-mediated mechanism of crystallization. Most notably, we find that the ability of tiny templates to modify…
Current models for the folding of the human genome see a hierarchy stretching down from chromosome territories, through A/B compartments and TADs (topologically-associating domains), to contact domains stabilized by cohesin and CTCF.…
Many biological functions are executed by molecular machines, which consume energy and convert it into mechanical work. Biological machines have evolved to transport cargo, facilitate folding of proteins and RNA, remodel chromatin and…
The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena that cover such…