Related papers: Spontaneous Domain Formation in Spherically-Confin…
We describe a theory of packing hyperboloid 'diabolic' domains in bend-free textures of liquid crystals. The domains sew together continuously, providing a menagerie of bend-free textures akin to the packing of focal conic domains in…
Many simple RNA viruses enclose their genetic material by a protein shell called the capsid. While the capsid structures are well characterized for most viruses, the structure of RNA inside the shells and the factors contributing to it…
DNA toroidal bundles form upon condensation of one or multiple DNA filaments. DNA filaments in toroidal bundles are hexagonally packed, and collectively twist around the center line of the toroid. In a previous study, we and our coworkers…
The thermodynamic properties of DNA circular molecules are investigated by a new path integral computational method which treats in the real space the fundamental forces stabilizing the molecule. The base pair and stacking contributions to…
The low-energy physics of (quasi)degenerate one-dimensional systems is typically understood as the particle-like dynamics of kinks between stable, ordered structures. Such dynamics, we show, becomes highly non-trivial when the ground states…
We examine the conformations of a model for a short segment of closed DNA. The molecule is represented as a cylindrically symmetric elastic rod with a constraint corresponding to a specification of the linking number. We obtain analytic…
Recent experiments demonstrated that knots in single DNA strands can be formed by hydrodynamic compression in a nanochannel. In this letter, we further elucidate the underlying molecular mechanisms by carrying out a compression experiment…
We study the compression and extension dynamics of a DNA-like polymer interacting with non-DNA binding and DNA-binding proteins, by means of computer simulations. The geometry we consider is inspired by recent experiments probing the…
Lipid vesicles composed of a mixture of two types of lipids are studied by intensive Monte-Carlo numerical simulations. The coupling between the local composition and the membrane shape is induced by two different spontaneous curvatures of…
Structural changes in giant DNA induced by the addition of the flexible polymer PEG were examined by the method of single-DNA observation. In dilute DNA conditions, individual DNA assumes a compact state via a discrete coil-globule…
Using Monte Carlo simulation, we study a fluid of two-dimensional hard rods inside a small circular cavity bounded by a hard wall, from the dilute regime to the high-density, layering regime. Both planar and homeotropic anchoring of the…
Relying on symmetry considerations appropriate for helical biopolymers such as DNA and filamentous actin, we argue that crystalline packings of mutually repulsive helical macromolecules fall principally into two categories: unfrustrated…
We report spin-selective tunneling of electrons along natural and artificial double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) sandwiched by nonmagnetic leads. The results reveal that the spin polarization strongly depends on the dsDNA sequence and is dominated…
We study theoretically a binary system in which an attraction of unlike particles is combined with a type-independent soft core repulsion. The possible experimental implementation of the system is a mixture of DNA-covered colloids, in which…
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…
DNA nanostructures with programmable shape and interactions can be used as building blocks for the self-assembly of crystalline materials with prescribed nanoscale features, holding a vast technological potential. Structural rigidity and…
Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby…
We demonstrate a method of controlled creation of spin domains in spin-1 antiferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensates. The method exploits the phenomenon of phase separation of spin components in an external potential. By using an…