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Recent experiments demonstrated that knots in single DNA strands can be formed by hydrodynamic compression in a nanochannel. In this letter, we further elucidate the underlying molecular mechanisms by carrying out a compression experiment…
We propose a mechanism in which two molecular knots pass through each other and swap positions along a polymer strand. Associated free energy barriers in our simulations only amount to a few $k_{B}T$, which may enable the interchange of…
Metagenomic binning aims to cluster DNA fragments from mixed microbial samples into their respective genomes, a critical step for downstream analyses of microbial communities. Existing methods rely on deterministic representations, such as…
We determine the phase diagram of DNA with inter- and intra-strand native-pair interactions that mimic the compaction of DNA. We show that DNA takes an overall sheet-like structure in the region where an incipient transition to a compact…
We put forward the idea of establishing a novel interdisciplinary field of research at the interface between quantum mechanics and proteomics. The new field, called quantum proteomics, is defined as the large-scale study of the electronic…
The spatial organization of DNA involves DNA loop extrusion and the formation of protein-DNA condensates. While the significance of each process is increasingly recognized, their interplay remains unexplored. Using molecular dynamics…
Ion conducting polymers have a biphasic character with crystalline as well as amorphous phases. There is moreover, a dynamic disorder due to motion of polymer chain segments. The PEO-NH$_4$ClO$_4$ system undergoes a crossover from a…
A stretched DNA molecule which is also under- or overwound, undergoes a buckling transition forming intertwined looped domains called plectonemes. Here we develop a simple theory that extends the two-phase model of stretched supercoiled…
The question of how stiff polymers are able to pack into small containers is particularly relevant to the study of DNA packaging in viruses. A reduced version of the problem based on coarse-grained representations of the main components of…
The eukaryotic cell nucleus harbors the DNA genome that is organized in a dynamic chromatin network and embedded in a viscous crowded fluid. This environment directly affects enzymatic reactions and target search processes that access the…
The yearly global production of data is growing exponentially, outpacing the capacity of existing storage media, such as tape and disk, and surpassing our ability to store it. DNA storage - the representation of arbitrary information as…
Within biology, it is of interest to construct DNA complexes of a certain shape. These complexes can be represented through graph theory, using edges to model strands of DNA joined at junctions, represented by vertices. Because guided…
Short DNA linkers are increasingly being exploited for driving specific self-assembly of Brownian objects. DNA-functionalised colloids can assemble into ordered or amorphous materials with tailored morphology. Recently, the same approach…
Many-body physics of electron-electron correlations plays a central role in condensed mater physics, it governs a wide range of phenomena, stretching from superconductivity to magnetism, and is behind numerous technological applications. To…
A simple model of a circularly closed dsDNA in a poor solvent is considered as an example of a semi-flexible polymer with self-attraction. To find the ground states, the conformational energy is computed as a sum of the bending and…
Using analytical approach and Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations, we study the elastic behaviour of the intrinsically twisted elastic ribbons with bending anisotropy, such as double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), in two-dimensional (2D) confinement. We…
Entangled ring polymers, along with blends of ring and linear polymers, continue to be a topic of great interest and debate due to the conflicting experimental results in the literature as well as the difficulty of producing entangled…
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…
Grid diagrams with their relatively simple mathematical formalism provide a convenient way to generate and model projections of various knots. It has been an open question whether these 2D diagrams can be used to model a complex 3D process…
The ability of double-stranded DNA or RNA to locally melt and form kinks leads to strong non-linear elasticity effects that qualitatively affect their packing in confined spaces. Using analytical theory and numerical simulation we show that…