Related papers: Integrating Transposable Elements in the 3D Genome
The three-dimensional organization of chromatin is thought to play an important role in controlling gene expression. Specificity in expression is achieved through the interaction of transcription factors and other nuclear proteins with…
We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical…
We present a statistical mechanics approach to the protein folding problem. We first review some of the basic properties of proteins, and introduce some physical models to describe their thermodynamics. These models rely on a random…
Background: Transposable elements (TEs) in eukaryote genomes are quantitatively the main components affecting genome size, structure and expression. The dynamics of their insertion and deletion depend on diverse factors varying in strength…
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
Polymerases are protein enzymes that move along nucleic acid chains and catalyze template-based polymerization reactions during gene transcription and replication. The polymerases also substantially improve transcription or replication…
A general theoretical framework is developed using free energy functional methods to understand the effects of heterogeneity in the folding of a well-designed protein. Native energetic heterogeneity arising from non-uniformity in native…
Understanding functional organization of genetic information is a major challenge in modern biology. Following the initial publication of the human genome sequence in 2001, advances in high-throughput measurement technologies and efficient…
We study a simple solvable model describing the genesis of monomer sequences for hetero-polymers (such as proteins), as the result of the equilibration of a slow stochastic genetic selection process which is assumed to be driven by the…
The coil-globule transition of hetero-polymer chains is studied here. By means of extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations, we show that the transition is directly linked to the complexity of the chain, which depends on the number of…
Timely up- or down-regulation of gene expression is crucial for cellular differentiation and function. While gene upregulation via transcriptional activators has been extensively investigated, gene silencing remains understudied, especially…
Our aim is to predict how often genic and non-genic promoters fire within a cell. We first review a parsimonious pan-genomic model for genome organization and gene regulation, where transcription rate is determined by proximity in 3D space…
The process of protein folding from an unfolded state to a biologically active, folded conformation is governed by many parameters e.g the sequence of amino acids, intermolecular interactions, the solvent, temperature and chaperon…
Models of protein energetics which neglect interactions between amino acids that are not adjacent in the native state, such as the Go model, encode or underlie many influential ideas on protein folding. Implicit in this simplification is a…
Protein structure prediction and folding are fundamental to understanding biology, with recent deep learning advances reshaping the field. Diffusion-based generative models have revolutionized protein design, enabling the creation of novel…
Polymer physics models suggest that chromatin spontaneously folds into loop networks with transcription units (TUs), such as enhancers and promoters, as anchors. Here we use combinatoric arguments to enumerate the emergent chromatin loop…
Transcriptional noise, or heterogeneity, is important in cellular development and in disease. The molecular mechanisms driving it are, however, elusive and ill-understood. Here, we use computer simulations to explore the role of 3D…
Understanding the spatial organisation of the genome in the cell nucleus is one of the current grand challenges in biophysics. Certain biochemical -- or epigenetic -- marks that are deposited along the genome are thought to play an…
Folding and aggregation of proteins, the interaction between proteins and membranes, as well as the adsorption of organic soft matter to inorganic solid substrates belong to the most interesting challenges in understanding structure and…
The three dimensional structure of DNA in the nucleus (chromatin) plays an important role in many cellular processes. Recent experimental advances have led to high-throughput methods of capturing information about chromatin conformation on…