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Homologous gene shuffling between DNA promotes genetic diversity and is an important pathway for DNA repair. For this to occur, homologous genes need to find and recognize each other. However, despite its central role in homologous…
Genetic stability is a key factor in maintaining, survival and reproduction of biological cells. It relies on many processes, but one of the most important is a {\it homologous recombination}, in which the repair of breaks in…
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…
Homologous recombination facilitates the exchange of genetic material between homologous DNA molecules. This crucial process requires detecting a specific homologous DNA sequence within a huge variety of heterologous sequences. The…
Gene expression and regulation rely on an apparently finely tuned set of reactions between some proteins and DNA. Such DNA-binding proteins have to find specific sequences on very long DNA molecules and they mostly do so in absence of any…
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…
Protein sequences are believed to have been selected to provide the stability of, and reliable renaturation to, an encoded unique spatial fold. In recently proposed theoretical schemes, this selection is modeled as ``minimal frustration,''…
We introduce a coarse-grained rigid nucleotide model of DNA that reproduces the basic thermodynamics of short strands: duplex hybridization, single-stranded stacking and hairpin formation, and also captures the essential structural…
It is not known how a cell manages to find a specific DNA sequence sufficiently fast to repair a broken chromosome through homologous recombination. I propose that the solution is based on a parallelized search implemented by freely…
Recognition and binding of specific sites on DNA by proteins is central for many cellular functions such as transcription, replication, and recombination. In the process of recognition, a protein rapidly searches for its specific site on a…
Mismatch repair is a critical step in DNA replication that occurs after base selection and proofreading, significantly increasing fidelity. However, the mechanism of mismatch recognition has not been established for any repair enzyme.…
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…
Specific binding of proteins to DNA is one of the most common ways in which gene expression is controlled. Although general rules for the DNA-protein recognition can be derived, the ambiguous and complex nature of this mechanism precludes a…
The structure of DNA Binding Proteins enables a strong interaction with their specific target site on DNA. However, recent single molecule experiment reported that proteins can diffuse on DNA. This suggests that the interactions between…
Compressed sensing is an image reconstruction technique to achieve high-quality results from limited amount of data. In order to achieve this, it utilizes prior knowledge about the samples that shall be reconstructed. Focusing on image…
Vital biological processes such as genome repair require fast and efficient binding of selected proteins to specific target sites on DNA. Here we propose an active target search mechanism based on "chromophoresis", the dynamics of…
Homologous recombination plays a key role in generating genetic diversity, while maintaining protein functionality. The mechanisms by which RecA enables a single-stranded segment of DNA to recognize a homologous tract within a whole genome…
Here we report on the use of double-nanohole (DNH) optical tweezers as a label-free and free-solution single-molecule probe for protein-DNA interactions. Using this approach, we demonstrate the unzipping of individual 10 base pair…
High-density oligonucleotide arrays are among the most rapidly expanding technologies in biology today. In the {\sl GeneChip} system, the reconstruction of the target concentration depends upon the differential signal generated from…
For most of the important processes in DNA metabolism, a protein has to reach a specific binding site on the DNA. The specific binding site may consist of just a few base pairs while the DNA is usually several millions of base pairs long.…