Related papers: When Knots are Plectonemes
Recent studies have suggested that the Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC) plays a significant role in mechanotransduction. When a force is exerted, the NPC's diameter widens, leading to an increased molecular flux into the nucleus. In this study,…
The scaling properties of DNA knots of different complexities were studied by atomic force microscope. Following two different protocols DNA knots are adsorbed onto a mica surface in regimes of (i) strong binding, that induces a kinetic…
Biomolecular condensates form by phase separation of biological polymers and have important functions in the cell $-$ functions that are inherently connected to their physical properties. A remarkable aspect of such condensates is that…
Histone octamers show a heat-induced mobility along DNA. Recent theoretical studies have established two mechanisms that are qualitatively and quantitatively compatible with in vitro experiments on nucleosome sliding: Octamer repositiong…
Digital information can be encoded in the building-block sequence of macromolecules, such as RNA and single-stranded DNA. Methods of "writing" and "reading" macromolecular strands are currently available, but they are slow and expensive. In…
We study the driven translocation of polymers under time-dependent driving forces using $N$-particle Langevin dynamics simulations. We consider the force to be either sinusoidally oscillating in time or dichotomic noise with exponential…
The DNA molecule, apart from carrying the genetic information, plays a crucial role in a variety of biological processes and find applications in drug design, nanotechnology and nanoelectronics. The molecule undergoes significant structural…
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…
The central dogma of molecular biology is the principal framework for understanding how nucleic acid information is propagated and used by living systems to create complex biomolecules. Here, by integrating the structural and dynamic…
We suggest a theoretical description of the force-induced translocation dynamics of a polymer chain through a nanopore. Our consideration is based on the tensile (Pincus) blob picture of a pulled chain and the notion of propagating front of…
Ionic transport in nanopores is a fundamentally and technologically important problem in view of its occurrence in biological processes and its impact on novel DNA sequencing applications. Using microscopic calculations, here we show that…
We use a nanofluidic system to investigate the emergence of thermally driven collective phenomena along a single polymer chain. In our approach, a single DNA molecule is confined in a nanofluidic slit etched with arrays of embedded…
We report an accurate method to determine DNA barcodes from the dwell time measurement of protein tags (barcodes) along the DNA backbone using Brownian dynamics simulation of a model DNA and use a recursive theoretical scheme which improves…
In this work, we combine coarse-grained Brownian dynamics simulations and mean-field theory to study supercoiling dynamics, as well as the steady-state profiles of twist and writhe, in an open DNA polymer where one of the free ends is…
Trapping, linearization, and imaging of single molecule DNA is of broad interest to both biophysicists who study polymer physics and engineers who build nucleic acid analyzing methods such as optical mapping. In this study, single DNA…
The viscous flow of polymer chains in dense melts is dominated by topological constraints whenever the single chain contour length, N, becomes larger than the characteristic scale Ne, defining comprehensively the macroscopic rheological…
Nucleic acids and proteins are not only biologically important polymers: They have recently been recognized as novel functional materials surpassing in many aspects the conventional ones. Although Herculean efforts have been undertaken to…
The translocation dynamics of a polymer chain through a nanopore in the absence of an external driving force is analyzed by means of scaling arguments, fractional calculus, and computer simulations. The problem at hand is mapped on a one…
We study how double-stranded DNA translocates through graphene nanogaps. Nanogaps are fabricated with a novel capillary-force induced graphene nanogap formation technique. DNA translocation signatures for nanogaps are qualitatively…
We show that the injection of polymer chains into nanochannels becomes easier as the channel becomes narrower. This counter intuitive result arises because of a decrease in the diffusive time scale of the chains with increasing confinement.…