Related papers: On a barrier height problem for RNA branching
We propose a protein model based on a hierarchy of constraints that force the protein to follow certain pathways when changing conformation. The model exhibits a first order phase transition, cooperativity and is exactly solvable. It also…
We describe an algorithm for comparing two RNA secondary structures coded in the form of trees that introduces two new operations, called node fusion and edge fusion, besides the tree edit operations of deletion, insertion, and relabeling…
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…
Distance-based approaches in phylogenetics such as Neighbor-Joining are a fast and popular approach for building trees. These methods take pairs of sequences from them construct a value that, in expectation, is additive under a stochastic…
We use mesoscopic non-equilibrium thermodynamics theory to describe RNA unfolding under tension. The theory introduces reaction coordinates, characterizing a continuum of states for each bond in the molecule. The unfolding considered is so…
The combinatorics of RNA plays a central role in biology. Mathematical biologists have several commonly-used models for RNA: words in a fixed alphabet (representing the primary sequence of nucleotides) and plane trees (representing the…
The viscosity dependence of the folding rates for four sequences (the native state of three sequences is a beta-sheet, while the fourth forms an alpha-helix) is calculated for off-lattice models of proteins. Assuming that the dynamics is…
Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in nature; diverse biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as ten hierarchical levels. Structural…
By exerting mechanical force it is possible to unfold/refold RNA molecules one at a time. In a small range of forces, an RNA molecule can hop between the folded and the unfolded state with force-dependent kinetic rates. Here, we introduce a…
We study the height of the maximal particle at time $t$ of a one dimensional branching Brownian motion with a space-dependent branching rate. The branching rate is set to zero in finitely many intervals (obstacles) of order $t$. We obtain…
Biomolecular folding, at least in simple systems, can be described as a two state transition in a free energy landscape with two deep wells separated by a high barrier. Transition paths are the short part of the trajectories that cross the…
Many recent exciting discoveries have revealed the versatility of RNAs and their importance in a variety of cellular functions which are strongly coupled to RNA structures. To understand the functions of RNAs, some structure prediction…
The main statistical distributions applicable to the analysis of genome architecture and genome tracks are briefly discussed and critically assessed. Although the observed features in distributions of element lengths can be equally well…
Mechanical unfolding trajectories, generated by applying constant force in optical tweezer experiments, show that RNA hairpins and the P5abc subdomain of the group I intron unfold reversibly. We use coarse-grained Go-like models for RNA…
We describe an explicitly discrete model of the process of DNA branch migration. The model matches the existing data well, but we find that branch migration along long strands of DNA ($N \simge 40$~bp) is also well modeled by continuum…
An all-atom model of proteins is used to show that the same sequence of amino acids can have many alternative structures, that are very distant from, and that can be as stable as, the corresponding native structure. Such alternative…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
We investigate the complexity of finding a transformation from a given spanning tree in a graph to another given spanning tree in the same graph via a sequence of edge flips. The exchange property of the matroid bases immediately yields…
A central goal of protein-folding theory is to predict the stochastic dynamics of transition paths --- the rare trajectories that transit between the folded and unfolded ensembles --- using only thermodynamic information, such as a…
We review the basic concepts and tools for mechanically unzipping RNA hairpins using force spectroscopy. By pulling apart the ends of an RNA molecule using optical tweezers, it is possible to measure the folding free energy at varying…