Related papers: Continuous-time random walk model for the diffusiv…
Nucleic acids have been regarded as stiff polymers with long-range flexibility and generally modeled using elastic rod models of polymer physics. Notwithstanding, investigations carried out over the past few years on single fragments of…
It is a standard exercise in mechanical engineering to infer the external forces and torques on a body from its static shape and known elastic properties. Here we apply this kind of analysis to distorted double-helical DNA in complexes with…
How a nano-searcher finds its nano-target is a general problem in non-equilibrium statistical physics. It becomes vital when the searcher is a damaged DNA fragment trying to find its counterpart on the intact homologous chromosome. If the…
By exerting mechanical force it is possible to unfold/refold RNA molecules one at a time. In a small range of forces, an RNA molecule can hop between the folded and the unfolded state with force-dependent kinetic rates. Here, we introduce a…
The movement of organisms and cells can be governed by occasional long distance runs, according to an approximate L\'evy walk. For T cells migrating through chronically-infected brain tissue, runs are further interrupted by long pauses, and…
Solid-state nanopore DNA sequencers present mechanical and chemical stability, reusability, and large-scale integrability. However, their development is hindered by the absence of a protein-free mechanism for controlling DNA translocation,…
A variety of transport processes in natural and man-made systems are intrinsically random. To model their stochasticity, lattice random walks have been employed for a long time, mainly by considering Cartesian lattices. However, in many…
DNA nanostructures are made using synthetic DNA strands, the sequences of which are designed such that they will self-assemble into the desired form by hybridization of complementary domains. Various structures and devices have been…
We predict various detectable mechanical responses to the presence of local DNA defects which are defined as short DNA segments exhibiting mechanical properties obviously different from the 50 nm persistence length based semiflexible…
A solvable model is proposed and analyzed to reveal the mechanism underlying the diffusion enhancement recently reported for a model of molecular motors and predicted to be observed in the biological rotary motor $\rm F_1$-ATPase. It turns…
Processive molecular motors which drive the traffic of organelles in cells move in a directed way along cytoskeletal filaments. On large time scales, they perform motor walks, i.e., peculiar random walks which arise from the repeated…
Random walks of particles on a lattice are a classical paradigm for the microscopic mechanism underlying diffusive processes. In deterministic walks, the role of space and time can be reversed, and the microscopic dynamics can produce quite…
Motivated by discrete kinetic models for non-cooperative molecular motors on periodic tracks, we consider random walks (also not Markov) on quasi one dimensional (1d) lattices, obtained by gluing several copies of a fundamental graph in a…
For short DNA molecules in crowded environments, we evaluate macroscopic parameters such as the average end-to-end distance and the twist conformation by tuning the strength of the site specific confinement driven by the crowders. The…
Bacterial genomes are partitioned into kilobases long domains that are topologically independent from each other, meaning that change of DNA superhelicity in one domain does not propagate to neighbours. This is made possible by proteins…
Flow-driven rotary motors drive functional processes in human society such as windmills and water wheels. Although examples of such rotary motors also feature prominently in cell biology, their synthetic construction at the nanoscale has…
We consider discrete and continuous representations of a thermodynamic process in which a random walker (e.g. a molecular motor on a molecular track) uses a periodically pumped energy (work) to pass $N$ sites and move energetically downhill…
Recent experiments show that transcription factors (TFs) indeed use the facilitated diffusion mechanism to locate their target sequences on DNA in living bacteria cells: TFs alternate between sliding motion along DNA and relocation events…
Although mechanical properties of DNA are well characterized at the kilo base-pair range, a number of recent experiments have suggested that DNA is more flexible at shorter length scales, which correspond to the regime that is crucial for…
We present a short review of various experiments that measure charge transfer and charge transport in DNA. Some general comments are made on the possible connection between 'chemistry-style' charge transfer experiments that probe…