Related papers: Sugar-Pucker Force-Induced Transition in Single-St…
Recent research on silver nanowires prepared on DNA templates has focused on two fundamental applications: nano-scale circuits and sensors. Despite its broad potential, the formation kinetics of DNA-templated silver nanowires remains…
Charge migration along DNA molecules has attracted scientific interest for over half a century. Reports on possible high rates of charge transfer between donor and acceptor through the DNA, obtained in the last decade from solution…
The macroscopic curvature of double helical DNA induced by regularly repeated adenine tracts is well-known but still puzzling. Its physical origin remains controversial even though it is perhaps the best-documented sequence modulation of…
The denaturation of double-stranded DNA as function of force and temperature is discussed. At room temperature, sequence heterogeneity dominates the physics of single molecule force-extension curves starting about 7 piconewtons of below a…
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…
RNA interference, particularly siRNA induced gene silencing is becoming an important avenue of modern therapeutics. The siRNA is delivered to the cells as short double helical RNA which becomes single stranded for forming the RISC complex.…
Recent experimental data indicate that the elastic wormlike rod model of DNA that works well on long length scales may break down on shorter scales relevant to biology. According to Noy and Golestanian (Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 228101, 2012)…
Single-molecule force spectroscopy has opened a new field of research in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Pulling experiments on individual proteins permit us to monitor conformational transitions with high temporal resolution and…
In mechanical manipulation experiments, a single DNA molecule overwound at constant force undergoes a discontinuous drop in extension as it buckles and forms a superhelical loop (a plectoneme). Further overwinding the DNA, we observe an…
A simple model of DNA based on two interacting polymers has been used to study the unzipping of a double stranded DNA subjected to a periodic force. We propose a dynamical transition, where without changing the physiological condition, it…
DNA supercoiling plays an important role in a variety of cellular processes. The torsional stress related with supercoiling may be also involved in gene regulation through the local structure and dynamics of the double helix. To check this…
A DNA-protein complex modelled by a semiflexible chain and an attractive spherical core is studied in the situation when an external stretching force is acting on one end monomer of the chain while the other end monomer is kept fixed in…
We obtain, using transfer matrix methods, the distribution function $P(R)$ of the end-to-end distance, the loop formation probability and force-extension relations in a model for short double-stranded DNA molecules. Accounting for the…
Genomic DNA is constantly subjected to various mechanical stresses arising from its biological functions and cell packaging. If the local mechanical properties of DNA change under torsional and tensional stress, the activity of…
The response of a short DNA segment to bending is studied, taking into account the anisotropy in the bending rigidities caused by the double-helical structure. It is shown that the anisotropy introduces an effective nonlinear twist-bend…
While analyzing the persistence length of DNA atomistic simulations Wu et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 142, 125103 (2015)] introduced an empirical formula to account for the observed length-dependence. In particular they found that the persistence…
Some important biomolecules (for instance, bacterial FtsZ and eukaryotic DNA) are known to posses spontaneous (intrinsic) curvature. Using a simple extension of the wormlike chain model, we study the response of a weakly bending filament in…
Recent experiments on unzipping of RNA helix-loop structures by force have shown that about 40-base molecules can undergo kinetic transitions between two well-defined `open' and `closed' states, on a timescale = 1 sec [Liphardt et al.,…
We investigate irreversibility and dissipation in single molecules that cooperatively fold/unfold in a two state manner under the action of mechanical force. We apply path thermodynamics to derive analytical expressions for the average…
The competition between toroidal and rod-like conformations as possible ground states for DNA condensation is studied as a function of the stiffness, the length of the DNA and the form of the long-range interactions between neighboring…