Related papers: Information-Thermodynamic Analysis of the DNA--RNA…
The telegraph model is the standard model of stochastic gene expression, which can be solved exactly to obtain the distribution of mature RNA numbers per cell. A modification of this model also leads to an analytical distribution of the…
We consider two complementary polymer strands of length $L$ attached by a common end monomer. The two strands bind through complementary monomers and at low temperatures form a double stranded conformation (zipping), while at high…
Gene transcription by a RNA Polymerase (RNAP) enzyme requires that double-stranded DNA be locally and transiently opened, which results in an increase of DNA supercoiling downstream of the RNAP and a decrease of supercoiling upstream of it.…
The thermodynamical properties of heterogeneous DNA sequences are computed by path integral techniques applied to a nonlinear model Hamiltonian. The base pairs relative displacements are interpreted as time dependent paths whose amplitudes…
The electrostatic interactions of phosphate groups and counter ions critically affect the structure, function and reactivity of DNA or RNA. We present a joint experimental-theoretical investigation of dimethyl phosphate (DMP-) in aqueous…
Background. Dramatic increases in RNA structural data have made it possible to recognize its conformational preferences much better than a decade ago. This has created an opportunity to use discrete restraint-based conformational sampling…
RNA polymerase (RNAP) is an enzyme that synthesizes a messenger RNA (mRNA) strand which is complementary to a single-stranded DNA template. From the perspective of physicists, an RNAP is a molecular motor that utilizes chemical energy input…
A polarizable environment, prominently the solvent, responds to electronic changes in biomolecules rapidly. The knowledge of conformational relaxation of the biomolecule itself, however, may be scarce or missing. In this work, we describe…
Motivation: RNA thermometers (RNATs) are cis-regulatory ele- ments that change secondary structure upon temperature shift. Often involved in the regulation of heat shock, cold shock and virulence genes, RNATs constitute an interesting…
We study theoretically the denaturation of single RNA molecules by mechanical stretching, focusing on signatures of the (un)folding pathway in molecular fluctuations. Our model describes the interactions between nucleotides by incorporating…
Conformational entropy for atomic-level, three dimensional biomolecules is known experimentally to play an important role in protein-ligand discrimination, yet reliable computation of entropy remains a difficult problem. Here we describe…
The statistical physics of homogeneous DNA is investigated by the imaginary time path integral formalism. The base pair stretchings are described by an ensemble of paths selected through a macroscopic constraint, the fulfillement of the…
We investigate the possibility of extending the notion of temperature in a stochastic model for the RNA/protein folding driven out of equilibrium. We simulate the dynamics of a small RNA hairpin subject to an external pulling force, which…
We propose a new statistical mechanics model for the melting transition of DNA. Base pairing and stacking are treated as separate degrees of freedom, and the interplay between pairing and stacking is described by a set of local rules which…
Stretched-exponential relaxation is a widely observed phenomenon found in ordered ferromagnets as well as glassy systems. One modeling approach connects this behavior to a droplet dynamics described by an effective Langevin equation for the…
RNA thermometers are mRNA strands with a temperature dependent secondary structure: depending on the spatial conformation, the mRNA strand can get translated (on-state) or can be inaccessible for ribosomes binding (off-state). These have…
{\it Transcription} is the process whereby RNA molecules are polymerized by molecular machines, called RNA polymerase (RNAP), using the corresponding DNA as the template. Recent {\it in-vivo} experiments with single cells have established…
In many important cellular processes, including mRNA translation, gene transcription, phosphotransfer, and intracellular transport, biological "particles" move along some kind of "tracks". The motion of these particles can be modeled as a…
We study plane trees as a model for RNA secondary structure, assigning energy to each tree based on the Nearest Neighbor Thermodynamic Model, and defining a corresponding Gibbs distribution on the trees. Through a bijection between plane…
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…