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Charge migration along DNA molecules has attracted scientific interest for over half a century. Reports on possible high rates of charge transfer between donor and acceptor through the DNA, obtained in the last decade from solution…
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…
Advances in DNA nanotechnology have stimulated the search for simple motifs that can be used to control the properties of DNA nanostructures. One such motif, which has been used extensively in structures such as polyhedral cages,…
Applying a force to certain supramolecular bonds may initially stabilize them, manifested by a lower dissociation rate. We show that this behavior, known as catch bonding and by now broadly reported in numerous biophysics bonds, is…
Blends of polymers of different topologies, such as ring and supercoiled, naturally occur in biology and often exhibit emergent viscoelastic properties coveted in industry. However, due to their complexity, along with the difficulty of…
Single-molecule experiments provide new insights into biological processes hitherto not accessible by measurements performed on bulk systems. We report on a study of the kinetics of a triple-branch DNA molecule with four conformational…
The relaxation dynamics of a polymer wound around a fixed obstacle constitutes a fundamental instance of polymer with twist and torque and it is of relevance also for DNA denaturation dynamics. We investigate it by simulations and Langevin…
A double stranded DNA molecule under the stress of a pulling force acting on the strand terminals exhibits a partially denatured structure or can be completely unzipped depending the magnitude of the pulling force. A scaling argument for…
The flexibility of short DNA chains is investigated via computation of the average correlation function between dimers which defines the persistence length. Path integration techniques have been applied to confine the phase space available…
Loop formation in long molecules occurs many places in nature, from solutions of carbon nanotubes to polymers inside a cell. In this article, we review theoretical studies of the static and dynamic properties of polymer loops. For example,…
We study the mechanical properties of semiflexible polymers when the contour length of the polymer is comparable to its persistence length. We compute the exact average end-to-end distance and shape of the polymer for different boundary…
A simple one-dimensional lattice model is suggested to describe the experimentally observed plateau in force-stretching diagrams for some macromolecules. This chain model involves the nearest-neighbor interaction of a Morse-like potential…
There are many proteins or protein complexes which have multiple DNA binding domains. This allows them to bind to multiple points on a DNA molecule (or chromatin fibre) at the same time. There are also many proteins which have been found to…
A theory of the unzipping of double-stranded (ds) DNA is presented, and is compared to recent micromanipulation experiments. It is shown that the interactions which stabilize the double helix and the elastic rigidity of single strands (ss)…
In recent years molecular elasticity has emerged as an active area of research: there are experiments that probe mechanical properties of single biomolecules such as DNA and Actin, with a view to understanding the role of elasticity of…
A theory is presented of the longitudinal dispersion of DNA under equilibrium confined in a nanochannel. Orientational fluctuations of the DNA chain build up to give rise to substantial fluctuations of the coil in the longitudinal direction…
Polymerases are protein enzymes that move along nucleic acid chains and catalyze template-based polymerization reactions during gene transcription and replication. The polymerases also substantially improve transcription or replication…
We present a detailed kinetic model for the Polymerase Chain Reaction, and model the probability of replication in terms of the physical parameters of the problem. Applying the theory of branching processes, we show the existance of a new…
Conformational change of a DNA molecule is frequently observed in multiple biological processes and has been modelled using a chain of strongly coupled oscillators with a nonlinear bistable potential. While the mechanism and properties of…
Ring polymers exhibit unique flow properties due to their closed chain topology. Despite recent progress, we have not yet achieved a full understanding of the nonequilibrium flow behavior of rings in nondilute solutions where intermolecular…