Related papers: Bind-and-bend model for DNA looping
The mechanical properties of DNA play a critical role in many biological functions. For example, DNA packing in viruses involves confining the viral genome in a volume (the viral capsid) with dimensions that are comparable to the DNA…
Modeling of DNA-protein interactions is a complex process involving many important time and length scales. This can be facilitated through the use of coarse-grained models which reduce the number of degrees of freedom and allow efficient…
Tethered particle experiments use light microscopy to measure the position of a micrometer-sized bead tethered to a microscope slide via a ~micrometer length polymer, in order to infer the behavior of the invisible polymer. Currently, this…
Current models for the folding of the human genome see a hierarchy stretching down from chromosome territories, through A/B compartments and TADs (topologically-associating domains), to contact domains stabilized by cohesin and CTCF.…
Structural-Maintenance-of-Chromosome (SMC) complexes such as condensins organise the folding of chromosomes. However, their role in modulating the entanglement of DNA and chromatin is not fully understood. To address this question, we…
Cells regulate gene expression in part by forming DNA-protein condensates in the nucleus. While existing theories describe the equilibrium size and stability of such condensates, their dynamics remain less understood. Here, we use…
DNA is subject to large deformations in a wide range of biological processes. Two key examples illustrate how such deformations influence the readout of the genetic information: the sequestering of eukaryotic genes by nucleosomes, and DNA…
We investigate diffusion-limited reactions between a diffusing particle and a target site on a semiflexible polymer, a key factor determining the kinetics of DNA-protein binding and polymerization of cytoskeletal filaments. Our theory…
Single-molecule experiments provide new insights into biological processes hitherto not accessible by measurements performed on bulk systems. We report on a study of the kinetics of a triple-branch DNA molecule with four conformational…
As the chief informational molecule of life, DNA is subject to extensive physical manipulations. The energy required to deform double-helical DNA depends on sequence, and this mechanical code of DNA influences gene regulation, such as…
Several processes in the cell, such as gene regulation, start when key proteins recognise and bind to short DNA sequences. However, as these sequences can be hundreds of million times shorter than the genome, they are hard to find by simple…
There are many proteins or protein complexes which have multiple DNA binding domains. This allows them to bind to multiple points on a DNA molecule (or chromatin fibre) at the same time. There are also many proteins which have been found to…
Many proteins interact with and deform double-stranded DNA in cells. Single-molecule experiments have studied the elasticity of DNA with helix-deforming proteins, including proteins that bend DNA. These experiments increase the need for…
Protein-DNA complexes with loops play a fundamental role in a wide variety of cellular processes, ranging from the regulation of DNA transcription to telomere maintenance. As ubiquitous as they are, their precise in vivo properties and…
Cooperativity plays an important role in the action of proteins bound to DNA. A simple, mechanical mechanism for cooperativity, in the form of a tension-mediated interaction between proteins bound to DNA at two different locations is…
We use an elastic rod model with contact to study the extension versus rotation diagrams of single supercoiled DNA molecules. We reproduce quantitatively the supercoiling response of overtwisted DNA and, using experimental data, we get an…
Quantum effects are mainly used for the determination of molecular shapes in molecular biology, but quantum information theory may be a more useful tool to understand the physics of life. Organic molecules and quantum circuits/protocols can…
DNA bending is biologically important for genome regulation and is relevant to a range of nanotechnological systems. Recent results suggest that sharp bending is much easier than implied by the widely-used worm-like chain model; many of…
The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core particle is studied using an elastic model that incorporates anisotropy in the bending energetics and twist-bend coupling. Using the experimentally determined structure of nucleosomal DNA [T.J.…
DNA looping plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of biological processes, providing the backbone for long range interactions on DNA. Here we develop the first model for DNA looping by an arbitrarily large number of proteins and solve…