Related papers: Sensing viruses by mechanical tension of DNA in re…
DNA self-assembly is a well-understood nanotechnology to obtain extremely ordered structures from the nanometer to up to the hundred of microns scale. By contrast, DNA hydrogels rely on the disordered assembly of DNA building blocks to…
Biophysicists and structural biologists increasingly acknowledge the role played by the mechanical properties of macromolecules as a critical element in many biological processes. This change has been brought about, in part, by the advent…
It is a standard exercise in mechanical engineering to infer the external forces and torques on a body from its static shape and known elastic properties. Here we apply this kind of analysis to distorted double-helical DNA in complexes with…
DNA-interacting proteins have roles multiple processes, many operating as molecular machines which undergo dynamic metastable transitions to bring about their biological function. To fully understand this molecular heterogeneity, DNA and…
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…
Stimulus-responsive DNA-hydrogels with swelling capabilities are a promising class of materials for biomedical applications such as drug delivery and biosensing. However, translation of these systems to microscale applications requires…
A key objective in DNA-based material science is understanding and precisely controlling the mechanical properties of DNA hydrogels. We perform microrheology measurements using diffusing-wave spectroscopy (DWS) to investigate the…
Multivalent interactions between deformable mesoscopic units are ubiquitous in biology, where membrane macromolecules mediate the interactions between neighbouring living cells and between cells and solid substrates. Lately, analogous…
When pulled along the axis, double-strand DNA undergoes a large conformational change and elongates roughly twice its initial contour length at a pulling force about 70 pN. The transition to this highly overstretched form of DNA is very…
With the continued improvement of sequencing technologies, the prospect of genome-based medicine is now at the forefront of scientific research. To realize this potential, however, we need a revolutionary sequencing method for the…
The mechanical properties of DNA play a critical role in many biological functions. For example, DNA packing in viruses involves confining the viral genome in a volume (the viral capsid) with dimensions that are comparable to the DNA…
DNA flexibility is a key determinant of biological function, from nucleosome positioning to transcriptional regulation, motivating a direct measurement of the bend-torque response of individual DNA molecules. In this work, DNA bending is…
The conjunction of insights from structural biology, solution biochemistry, genetics and single molecule biophysics has provided a renewed impetus for the construction of quantitative models of biological processes. One area that has been a…
When the DNA double helix is subjected to external forces it can stretch elastically to elongations reaching 100% of its natural length. These distortions, imposed at the mesoscopic or macroscopic scales, have a dramatic effect on…
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…
The hybridization and dehybridization of DNA subject to tension is relevant to fundamental genetic processes and to the design of DNA-based mechanobiology assays. While strong tension accelerates DNA melting and decelerates DNA annealing,…
The rupture of double-stranded DNA under stress is a key process in biophysics and nanotechnology. In this article we consider the shear-induced rupture of short DNA duplexes, a system that has been given new importance by recently designed…
The effective interaction between two parallel strands of helical bio-molecules, such as deoxyribose nucleic acids (DNA), is calculated using computer simulations of the "primitive" model of electrolytes. In particular we study a simple…
Trapping, linearization, and imaging of single molecule DNA is of broad interest to both biophysicists who study polymer physics and engineers who build nucleic acid analyzing methods such as optical mapping. In this study, single DNA…
Since the birth of computer and networks, fuelled by pervasive computing and ubiquitous connectivity, the amount of data stored and transmitted has exponentially grown through the years. Due to this demand, new solutions for storing data…