Related papers: Chromatin: a tunable spring at work inside chromos…
The flexibility of short DNA chains is investigated via computation of the average correlation function between dimers which defines the persistence length. Path integration techniques have been applied to confine the phase space available…
Within a simple elastic theory, we study the elongation versus force characteristics of a supercoiled DNA molecule at thermal equilibrium in the regime of small supercoiling. The partition function is mapped to the path integral…
The elastic properties of semiflexible polymers are of great importance in biology. There are experiments on biopolymers like double stranded DNA, which twist and stretch single molecules to probe their elastic properties. It is known that…
A versatile approach to modeling the conformations and energetics of DNA loops is presented. The model is based on the classical theory of elasticity, modified to describe the intrinsic twist and curvature of DNA, the DNA bending…
We elucidate the elastic behavior of a wormlike chain in 3D under compression and provide exact solutions for the experimentally accessible force-extension relation in terms of generalized spheroidal wave functions. In striking contrast to…
Polymer models play the special role of elucidating the elementary features describing the physics of long molecules and become essential to interpret the measurements of their magnitudes. In this work the end-to-end distance of an…
Transcriptional noise, or heterogeneity, is important in cellular development and in disease. The molecular mechanisms driving it are, however, elusive and ill-understood. Here, we use computer simulations to explore the role of 3D…
The symmetries of the DNA double helix require a new term in its linear response to stress: the coupling between twist and stretch. Recent experiments with torsionally-constrained single molecules give the first direct measurement of this…
Chromatin is known to be organized into multiple domains of varying sizes and compaction. While these domains are often imagined as static structures, they are highly dynamic and show cell-to-cell variability. Since processes such as gene…
A growing or compressed thin elastic sheet adhered to a rigid substrate can exhibit a buckling instability, forming an inward hump. Our study shows that the strip morphology depends on the delicate balance between the compression energy and…
Dynamics of nucleosomes, the building blocks of the chromatin, has crucial effects on expression, replication and repair of genomes in eukaryotes. Beside constant movements of nucleosomes by thermal fluctuations, ATP-dependent chromatin…
The twisting deformation of mechanically stretched DNA molecules is studied by a coarse grained Hamiltonian model incorporating the fundamental interactions that stabilize the double helix and accounting for the radial and angular base pair…
We present a solution for the Green's function for the general case of a helical wormlike chain with twist-bend coupling, and demonstrate the applicability of our solution for evaluating general structural and mechanical chain properties.…
We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…
Experimental approaches have been applied to address questions in understanding three-dimensional chromatin organisation and function. As datasets increase in size and complexity, it becomes a challenge to reach a mechanistic interpretation…
By observing reconstituted chromatin by fluorescence microscopy (FM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), we found that the density of nucleosomes exhibits a bimodal profile, i.e., there is a large transition between the dense and dispersed…
A problem of substantial interest is to systematically map variation in chromatin structure to gene expression regulation across conditions, environments, or differentiated cell types. We developed and applied a quantitative framework for…
We investigated the viscoelastic response of model interphase chromosomes by tracking the three-dimensional motion of hundreds of dispersed Brownian particles of sizes ranging from the thickness of the chromatin fiber up to slightly above…
Within the nucleus, structural maintenance of chromosome protein complexes, namely condensin and cohesin, create an architecture to facilitate the organization and proper function of the genome. Condensin, in addition to performing loop…
A living cell is an active environment where the organization and dynamics of chromatin are affected by different forms of activity. Optical experiments report that loci show subdiffusive dynamics and the chromatin fiber is seen to be…