Related papers: Coarse-grained modelling of strong DNA bending I: …
DNA cyclization is a powerful technique to gain insight into the nature of DNA bending. The worm-like chain model provides a good description of small to moderate bending fluctuations, but some experiments on strongly-bent shorter molecules…
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…
Three coarse-grained models of the double-stranded DNA are proposed and compared in the context of mechanical manipulation such as twisting and various schemes of stretching. The models differ in the number of effective beads (between two…
Many proteins interact with and deform double-stranded DNA in cells. Single-molecule experiments have studied the elasticity of DNA with helix-deforming proteins, including proteins that bend DNA. These experiments increase the need for…
We explore in detail the structural, mechanical and thermodynamic properties of a coarse-grained model of DNA similar to that introduced in Thomas E. Ouldridge, Ard A. Louis, Jonathan P.K. Doye, Phys. Rev. Lett. 104 178101 (2010). Effective…
Modeling of DNA-protein interactions is a complex process involving many important time and length scales. This can be facilitated through the use of coarse-grained models which reduce the number of degrees of freedom and allow efficient…
We develop a continuum elastic approach to examining the bending mechanics of semiflexible filaments with a local internal degree of freedom that couples to the bending modulus. We apply this model to study the nonlinear mechanics of a…
We study the elastic response of a worm-like polymer chain with reversible kink-like structural defects. This is a generic model for (a) the double-stranded DNA with sharp bends induced by binding of certain proteins, and (b) effects of…
The folding of RNA and DNA strands plays crucial roles in biological systems and bionanotechnology. However, studying these processes with high-resolution numerical models is beyond current computational capabilities due to the timescales…
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…
We introduce a coarse-grained model of DNA with bases modeled as rigid-body ellipsoids to capture their anisotropic stereochemistry. Interaction potentials are all physicochemical and generated from all-atom simulation/parameterization with…
The sequence-dependent elasticity of double-helical DNA on a nm length scale can be captured by the rigid base-pair model, whose strains are the relative position and orientation of adjacent base-pairs. Corresponding elastic potentials have…
We report a theoretical study of DNA flexibility and quantitatively predict the ring closure probability as a function of DNA contour length. Recent experimental studies show that the flexibility of short DNA fragments (as compared to the…
We use a recently developed coarse-grained model to simulate the overstretching of duplex DNA. Overstretching at 23C occurs at 74 pN in the model, about 6-7 pN higher than the experimental value at equivalent salt conditions. Furthermore,…
Although RNAs play many cellular functions little is known about the dynamics and thermodynamics of these molecules. In principle, all-atom molecular dynamics simulations can investigate these issues, but with current computer facilities,…
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…
It is well-established that many physical properties of DNA at sufficiently long length scales can be understood by means of simple polymer models. One of the most widely used elasticity models for DNA is the twistable worm-like chain…
Coarse-grained models have emerged as valuable tools to simulate long DNA molecules while maintaining computational efficiency. These models aim at preserving interactions among coarse-grained variables in a manner that mirrors the…
The strong bending of polymers is poorly understood. We propose a general quantitative framework of polymer bending that includes both the weak and strong bending regimes on the same footing, based on a single general physical principle. As…
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…