Related papers: Fine Structure of Viral dsDNA Encapsidation
We use a lattice model of a ternary mixture containing saturated and unsaturated lipids with cholesterol (Chol), to study the structural properties characterizing the coexistence between the liquid-disordered and liquid-ordered phases.…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Physical vapor deposition can be used to prepare highly stable organic glass systems where the molecules show orientational and translational ordering at the nanoscale. We have used low-dose four-dimensional scanning transmission electron…
The volume occupied by unconstrained bacterial DNA in physiological solutions exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Still, it is confined to a well defined region of the cell called the nucleoid, which occupies only a fraction of the…
Eukaryotic DNA is packaged into chromatin: one-dimensional arrays of nucleosomes separated by stretches of linker DNA are folded into 30-nm chromatin fibers which in turn form higher-order structures. Each nucleosome, the fundamental unit…
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…
From the analysis of sizes of approximately 130 small icosahedral viruses we find that there is a typical structural capsid protein, having a mean diameter of 5 nm and a mean thickness of 3 nm, with more than two thirds of the analyzed…
Recent experimental and theoretical approaches have attempted to quantify the physical organization (compaction and geometry) of the bacterial chromosome with its complement of proteins (the nucleoid). The genomic DNA exists in a complex…
Particle tracking is a key to single-particle-level confocal microscopy observation of colloidal suspensions, emulsions, and granular matter. The conventional tracking method has not been able to provide accurate information on the size of…
Minimal energy shapes of closed, elastic shells with twelve pentagonal disclinations introduced in otherwise hexagonally coordinated crystalline lattice are studied. The geometry and the total energy of shells are studied as a function of…
Entropy drives the phase behavior of colloids ranging from dense suspensions of hard spheres or rods to dilute suspensions of hard spheres and depletants. Entropic ordering of anisotropic shapes into complex crystals, liquid crystals, and…
Recently, continuum elasticity theory has been applied to explain the shape transition of icosahedral viral capsids - single-protein-thick crystalline shells - from spherical to buckled/faceted as their radius increases through a critical…
We investigate the early part of the crystal nucleation process in the hard sphere fluid using data produced by computer simulation. We find that hexagonal order manifests continuously in the overcompressed liquid, beginning approximately…
The encapsulation of hydrogen-terminated nanosized diamond fragments (the so-called diamondoids) into armchair single walled carbon nanotubes with diameters in the range of 1.0 up to 2.2 nm has been investigated using classical molecular…
Microcanonical Monte Carlo simulations of a polydisperse soft-spheres model for liquids and colloids have been performed for very large polydispersity, in the region where a phase-separation is known to occur when the system (or part of it)…
Computer simulations are presented of the isotropic-to-nematic transition in a liquid crystal confined between two parallel plates a distance H apart. The plates are neutral and do not impose any anchoring on the particles. Depending on the…
The phase-ordering kinetics of a bulk uniaxial nematic liquid crystal is addressed using techniques that have been successfully applied to describe ordering in the O(n) model. The method involves constructing an appropriate mapping between…
The liquid-liquid phase separation of biomolecules is an important process for intracellular organization. Biomolecular sequence combinatorics leads to a large variety of proteins and nucleic acids which can interact to form a diversity of…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
We show experimentally that a cheap glass microcapillary can accumulate {\lambda}-phage DNA at its tip and deliver the DNA into the capillary using a combination of electro-osmotic flow, pressure-driven flow, and electrophoresis. We develop…