Related papers: The dimensionality of a coiled helical coil
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…
The chromatin fiber is a complex of DNA and specific proteins called histones forming the first structural level of organization of eukaryotic chromosomes. In tightly organized chromatin fibers, the short segments of naked DNA linking the…
When the DNA double helix is subjected to external forces it can stretch elastically to elongations reaching 100% of its natural length. These distortions, imposed at the mesoscopic or macroscopic scales, have a dramatic effect on…
We study the static and dynamical properties of DNA in the vicinity of its melting transition, i.e. the separation of the two strands upon heating. The investigation is based on a simple mechanical model which includes the helicoidal…
Helical solenoids have been proposed as an option for a Helical Cooling Channel for muons in a proposed Muon Collider. Helical solenoids can provide the required three main field components: solenoidal, helical dipole, and a helical…
The twist-bend nematic liquid crystal phase is a three-dimensional fluid in which achiral bent molecules spontaneously form an orientationally ordered macroscopically chiral heliconical winding of molecular scale pitch, in absence of…
It is known since the early days of molecular biology that proteins locate their specific targets on DNA up to two orders of magnitude faster than the Smoluchowski 3D diffusion rate. It was the idea due to Delbruck that they are…
The hyperbolic structure on a 3-dimensional cone-manifold with a knot as singularity can often be deformed into a limiting Euclidean structure. In the present paper we show that the respective normalised Euclidean volume is always an…
Essential life processes take place across multiple space and time scales in living organisms but understanding their mechanistic interactions remains an ongoing challenge. Advanced multiscale modeling techniques are providing new…
By exploiting the exquisite selectivity of DNA hybridization, DNA-Coated Colloids (DNACCs) can be made to self-assemble in a wide variety of structures. The beauty of this system stems largely from its exceptional versatility and from the…
The classification of large halos formed by two identical particles and a core is systematically addressed according to interparticle distances. The root-mean-square distances between the constituents are described by universal scaling…
The shape of the building blocks plays a crucial role in directing self-assembly towards desired architectures. Out of the many different shapes, helix has a unique position. Helical structures are ubiquitous in nature and a helical shape…
We investigate the mechanical stability of a segment of DNA wrapped around a histone in the nucleosome configuration. The assumption underlying this investigation is that the proper model for this packaging arrangement is that of an elastic…
In condensed matter physics, simplified descriptions are obtained by coarse-graining the features of a system at a certain characteristic length, defined as the typical length beyond which some properties are no longer correlated. From a…
A model of self-avoiding walk with suitable constraints on self-attraction is developed to describe the conformational behavior of a short RNA or a single stranded DNA molecule that forms hairpin structure and calculate the properties…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
We present a self-contained theory for the mechanical response of DNA in single molecule experiments. Our model is based on a 1D continuum description of the DNA molecule and accounts both for its elasticity and for DNA-DNA electrostatic…
Motivated by recent experiments probing shape, size and dynamics of bacterial chromosomes in growing cells, we consider a polymer model consisting of a circular backbone to which side-loops are attached, confined to a cylindrical cell. Such…
We establish the most general form of the discrete elasticity of a 2D triangular lattice embedded in three dimensions, taking into account up to next-nearest neighbour interactions. Besides crystalline system, this is relevant to biological…
Chirality is breaking of mirror symmetry in matter. In the fields of biology and chemistry, this is particularly important because some of the essential molecules in life such as amino acids and DNA have chirality. It is a long-standing…