Related papers: Supercoiling Enhances DNA Mobility by Reducing Thr…
We study the melting of a double stranded DNA in the presence of stretching forces, via 3D Monte-Carlo simulations, exactly solvable models and heuristic arguments. The resulting force-temperature phase diagram is dramatically different for…
A methodology for the statistical mechanical analysis of polymeric chains under tension introduced previously is extended to include torque. The response of individual bonds between monomers or of entire groups of monomers to a combination…
Quantum aspects, such as electron tunneling between closely separated metallic nanoparticles, are crucial for understanding the plasmonic response of nanoscale systems. We explore quantum effects on the response of the conductively coupled…
We deduced the torque applied on a single stretched and twisted DNA by integrating with respect to force the change in the molecule's extension as it is coiled. While consistent with previous direct measurements of the torque at high forces…
Methods for reducing and directly controlling the speed of DNA through a nanopore are needed to enhance sensing performance for direct strand sequencing and detection/mapping of sequence-specific features. We have created a method for…
We propose a new method for electrophoretic separation of DNA in which adsorbed polymers are driven over a disordered two-dimensional substrate which contains attractive sites for the polymers. Using simulations of a model for long polymer…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
We develop a continuum elastic approach to examining the bending mechanics of semiflexible filaments with a local internal degree of freedom that couples to the bending modulus. We apply this model to study the nonlinear mechanics of a…
The advent of solid state nanodevices allows for interrogating the physico-chemical properties of a polyelectrolyte chain by electrophoretically driving it through a nanopore. Salient dynamical aspects of the translocation process have been…
By combining analytical results and simulations of various coarse-grained models we investigate the minimal energy shape of DNA minicircles which are torsionally constrained by an imposed over or undertwist. We show that twist-bend…
The proper design of DNA sequences allows for the formation of well defined supramolecular units with controlled interactions via a consecution of self-assembling processes. Here, we benefit from the controlled DNA self-assembly to…
Solid-state nanopore DNA sequencers present mechanical and chemical stability, reusability, and large-scale integrability. However, their development is hindered by the absence of a protein-free mechanism for controlling DNA translocation,…
The volume occupied by the unconstrained genomic DNA of prokaryotes in saline solutions is thousand times larger than the cell. Moreover, it is not separated from the rest of the cell by a membrane. Nevertheless, it occupies only a small…
Nucleic acids are highly deformable helical molecules constantly stretched, twisted and bent in their biological functioning. Single molecule experiments have shown that double stranded (ds)-RNA and standard ds-DNA have opposite…
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…
Particles with ligand-receptor contacts bind and unbind fluctuating "legs" to surfaces, whose fluctuations cause the particle to diffuse. Quantifying the diffusion of such "nanoscale caterpillars" is a challenge, since binding events often…
The ongoing effort to detect and characterize physical entanglement in biopolymers has so far established that knots are present in many globular proteins and also abound in viral DNA packaged inside bacteriophages. RNA molecules, on the…
It is well-established that many physical properties of DNA at sufficiently long length scales can be understood by means of simple polymer models. One of the most widely used elasticity models for DNA is the twistable worm-like chain…
DNA has a well-defined structural transition -- the denaturation of its double-stranded form into two single strands -- that strongly affects its thermal transport properties. We show that, according to a widely implemented model for DNA…
The force-extension relation for a semi-flexible polymer such as DNA confined in a nanoslit is investigated and it is found that both the effective persistence length and the form of the force-extension relation change as the chain goes…