Related papers: Polymerization and replication of primordial RNA i…
Polymer composites are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, owing to their emergent desirable mechanical properties not attainable in single-species systems. At the same time, polymer topology has been shown to play a key role in…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
This work examines a field theory for RNA-like molecules in a good solvent. The field theory is based on a lattice model for single- and double-strand RNA with a periodic base sequence, and otherwise contains all known relevant details…
Backtracking of RNA polymerase (RNAP) is an important pausing mechanism during DNA transcription that is part of the error correction process that enhances transcription fidelity. We model the backtracking mechanism of RNA polymerase, which…
Ring polymers are prevalent in natural and engineered systems, including circular bacterial DNA, crown ethers for cation chelation, and mechanical nanoswitches. The morphology and dynamics of ring polymers are governed by the chemistry and…
We describe quantitatively a RNA molecule under the influence of an external force exerted at its two ends as in a typical single-molecule experiment. Our calculation incorporates the interactions between nucleotides by using the…
We discuss multiscale simulations of long biopolymer translocation through wide nanopores that can accommodate multiple polymer strands. The simulations provide clear evidence of folding quantization, namely, the translocation proceeds…
We discuss how information encoded in a template polymer can be stochastically copied into a copy polymer. We consider four different stochastic copy protocols of increasing complexity, inspired by building blocks of the mRNA translation…
Genetic information is stored in a linear sequence of base-pairs; however, thermal fluctuations and complex DNA conformations such as folds and loops make it challenging to order genomic material for in vitro analysis. In this work, we…
Non-equilibrium conditions must have been crucial for the assembly of the first informational polymers of early life, but supporting their formation and continuous enrichment in a long-lasting environment. Here, we explore how gas bubbles…
The folding of RNA and DNA strands plays crucial roles in biological systems and bionanotechnology. However, studying these processes with high-resolution numerical models is beyond current computational capabilities due to the timescales…
Crystal nucleation is relevant across the domains of fundamental and applied sciences. However, in many cases its mechanism remains unclear due to a lack of temporal or spatial resolution. To gain insights to the molecular details of…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
DNA polymerases are an essential class of enzymes or molecular motors that catalyze processive DNA syntheses during DNA replications. A critical issue for DNA polymerases is their molecular mechanism of processive DNA replication. We have…
The problem of storing large amounts of information safely for a long period of time has become essential. One of the most promising new data storage mediums are the polymer-based data storage systems, like the DNA-storage system. These…
RNA co-transcriptional folding has long been suspected to play an active role in helping proper native folding of ribozymes and structured regulatory motifs in mRNA untranslated regions. Yet, the underlying mechanisms and coding…
Replication of genetic material is an important process for all living organisms. Origins of replication initiate the copying of DNA at many points on a chromosome, and it is the distribution of these points that is relevant here, as it…
The opening of the Y-fork - the first step of DNA replication - is shown to be a critical phenomenon under an external force at one of its ends. From the results of an equivalent delocalization in a non-hermitian quantum-mechanics problem…
We propose a scenario for the prebiotic co-evolution of RNA and of fast folding proteins with large entropy gaps as observed today. We show from very general principles that the folding and unfolding of the proteins synthesized by RNA can…
DNA dependent RNA polymerase core subunits abb' conserved residues at frequencies most closely matched with codons at stage 10.4-11.1 in code evolution. An excess of acidic residues (stage 2 additions) lowered this estimate, but not by more…