Related papers: Crowding induces entropically-driven changes to DN…
The physical and chemical environment inside cells is of fundamental importance to all life but has traditionally been difficult to determine on a subcellular basis. Here we combine cutting-edge genomically integrated FRET biosensing to…
The influence of crowding on the diffusion of tagged particles in a dense medium is investigated in the framework of a mean-field model, derived in the continuum limit from a microscopic stochastic process with exclusion. The probability…
DNA is subject to large deformations in a wide range of biological processes. Two key examples illustrate how such deformations influence the readout of the genetic information: the sequestering of eukaryotic genes by nucleosomes, and DNA…
Effects of sequence disorder on looping and cyclization of the double-stranded DNA are studied theoretically. Both random intrinsic curvature and inhomogeneous bending rigidity are found to result in a remarkably wide distribution of…
Tracer diffusion in crowded environments is central to many biological and soft matter systems, but quantitative frameworks for linking tracer motion to environmental structure remain limited. Here, we study the transport of rigid tracers…
In living cells, proteins involved in specialized biochemical functions are often spatially organized within biomolecular condensates. Increasing evidence suggests that some of these condensates, including DNA repair condensates, emerge…
The two strands of a DNA molecule with a repetitive sequence can pair into many different basepairing patterns. For perfectly periodic sequences, early bulk experiments of Poerschke indicate the existence of a sliding process, permitting…
In systems as diverse as migrating mammals to road traffic, crowding acts to inhibit efficient collective movement. Bacteria, however, are observed to move in very dense groups containing billions of individuals without causing the gridlock…
Droplet microfluidics, in which micro-droplets serve as individual reactors, has enabled a wide range of high-throughput biochemical processes. Unlike solid wells typically used in current biochemical assays, droplets are subject to…
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…
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…
In living systems, DNA undergoes continuous and rhythmic mechanical remodeling through condensation, looping, and disentangling to regulate gene expression, segregate chromosomes, and guide morphogenesis. Here, we demonstrate a purely…
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.…
A ubiquitous observation in cell biology is that diffusion of macromolecules and organelles is anomalous, and a description simply based on the conventional diffusion equation with diffusion constants measured in dilute solution fails. This…
The behavior of long DNA molecules in a cell-sized confined space was investigated. We prepared water-in-oil droplets covered by phospholipids, which mimic the inner space of a cell, following the encapsulation of DNA molecules with…
The competition between toroidal and rod-like conformations as possible ground states for DNA condensation is studied as a function of the stiffness, the length of the DNA and the form of the long-range interactions between neighboring…
Charge diffusion through desoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a physico-chemical phenomenon that on the one hand is being explored for technological purposes, on the other hand is applied by nature for various informational processes in life.…
DNA is a leading candidate as the next archival storage media due to its density, durability and sustainability. To read (and write) data DNA storage exploits technology that has been developed over decades to sequence naturally occurring…
We study by extensive numerical simulations the dynamics of a hard-core tracer particle (TP) in presence of two competing types of disorder - frozen convection flows on a square random Manhattan lattice and a crowded dynamical environment…
The effect of sequence heterogeneity on polynucleotide translocation across a pore and on simple models of molecular motors such as helicases, DNA polymerase/exonuclease and RNA polymerase is studied in detail. Pore translocation of RNA or…