Related papers: Chromosome Compaction and Chromatin Stiffness Enha…
The population-averaged contact maps generated by the chromosome conformation capture technique provide important information about the average frequency of contact between pairs of chromatin loci as a function of the genetic distance…
A theoretical framework for evaluating the approximate energy and dynamic properties associated with the folding of DNA into nucleosomes and chromatin is presented. For this purpose experimentally determined elastic constants of linear DNA…
Characterizing the link between small-scale chromatin structure and large-scale chromosome folding during interphase is a prerequisite for understanding transcription. Yet, this link remains poorly investigated. Here, we introduce a simple…
Loop extrusion convincingly describes how certain Structural Maintenance of Chromosome (SMC) proteins mediate the formation of large DNA loops. Yet, most of the existing computational models cannot reconcile recent in vitro observations…
Chromatin looping is a major epigenetic regulatory mechanism in higher eukaryotes. Besides its role in transcriptional regulation, chromatin loops have been proposed to play a pivotal role in the segregation of entire chromosomes. The…
One-dimensional arrays of nucleosomes (DNA-bound histone octamers separated by stretches of linker DNA) fold into higher-order chromatin structures which ultimately make up eukaryotic chromosomes. Chromatin structure formation leads to…
In living cells, proteins combine 3D bulk diffusion and 1D sliding along the DNA to reach a target faster. This process is known as facilitated diffusion, and we investigate its dynamics in the physiologically relevant case of confined DNA.…
We use Monte Carlo simulations to study attractive and excluded volume interactions between nucleosome core particles in 30 nm-chromatin fibers. The nucleosomes are treated as disk-like objects having an excluded volume and short range…
A recent survey of 17 134 proteins has identified a new class of proteins which are expected to yield stretching induced force-peaks in the range of 1 nN. Such high force peaks should be due to forcing of a slip-loop through a cystine ring,…
Within the nucleus, structural maintenance of chromosome protein complexes, namely condensin and cohesin, create an architecture to facilitate the organization and proper function of the genome. Condensin, in addition to performing loop…
Langevin dynamics is employed to study the looping kinetics of self-avoiding polymers both in ideal and crowded solutions. A rich kinetics results from the competition of two crowding-induced effects: the depletion attraction and the…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
The chromatin fiber is a complex of DNA and specific proteins called histones forming the first structural level of organization of eukaryotic chromosomes. In tightly organized chromatin fibers, the short segments of naked DNA linking the…
The three-dimensional organization of chromatin, on the length scale of a few genes, is crucial in determining the functional state - accessibility and the amount of gene expression - of the chromatin. Recent advances in chromosome…
In many biochemical processes, proteins bound to DNA at distant sites are brought into close proximity by loops in the underlying DNA. For example, the function of some gene-regulatory proteins depends on such DNA looping interactions. We…
We develop a theoretical approach to the protein folding problem based on out-of-equilibrium stochastic dynamics. Within this framework, the computational difficulties related to the existence of large time scale gaps in the protein folding…
We develop a kinetic theory of cohesin-driven loop extrusion on a disordered chromatin track with transient barriers. In the stationary state, the mean loop size is shown to obey a universal law determined by the bare processivity and a…
We present a theoretical analysis of the structural and mechanical properties of the 30-nm chromatin fiber. Our study is based on the two-angle model introduced by Woodcock et al. (Woodcock, C. L., S. A. Grigoryev, R. A. Horowitz, and N.…
A Markov state model is a powerful tool that can be used to track the evolution of populations of configurations in an atomistic representation of a protein. For a coarse-grained linear chain model with discontinuous interactions, the…
During the eukaryotic cell cycle, chromatin undergoes several conformational changes, which are believed to play key roles in gene expression regulation during interphase, and in genome replication and division during mitosis. In this…