Related papers: The physics of chromatin
It is shown that the nucleotide sequences in DNA molecules have cluster-scaling properties (discovered for the first time in turbulent processes: Sreenivasan and Bershadskii, 2006, J. Stat. Phys., 125, 1141-1153.). These properties are…
Nucleic acids are highly deformable helical molecules constantly stretched, twisted and bent in their biological functioning. Single molecule experiments have shown that double stranded (ds)-RNA and standard ds-DNA have opposite…
Positioning of nucleosomes along eukaryotic genomes plays an important role in their organization and regulation. There are many different factors affecting the location of nucleosomes. Some can be viewed as preferential binding of a single…
We use a recently developed coarse-grained model for DNA to study kissing complexes formed by hybridization of complementary hairpin loops. The binding of the loops is topologically constrained because their linking number must remain…
Advances in DNA nanotechnology have stimulated the search for simple motifs that can be used to control the properties of DNA nanostructures. One such motif, which has been used extensively in structures such as polyhedral cages,…
The prediction of the three-dimensional native structure of proteins from the knowledge of their amino acid sequence, known as the protein folding problem, is one of the most important yet unsolved issues of modern science. Since the…
We investigated the effect of torsional rigidity of a semiflexible chain on the wrapping transition around a spherical core, as a model of nucleosome, the fundamental unit of chromatin. Through molecular dynamics simulation, we show that…
Human chromosome 21 is the only chromosome in human genome that exhibits oscillation of (G+C)-content of cycle length of hundreds kilobases (500 kb near the right telomere). We aim at establishing the existence of similar periodicity in…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
Various symmetries connected with purine-pyrimidine content of DNA sequences are studied in terms of the intruduced determinative degree, a new characteristics of nucleotide which is connected with codon usage. A numerological explanation…
In eukaryotic genomes, nucleosomes function to compact DNA and to regulate access to it both by simple physical occlusion and by providing the substrate for numerous covalent epigenetic tags. While nucleosome positions in vitro are…
The ubiquitous biomacromolecule DNA has an axial rigidity persistence length of ~50 nm, driven by its elegant double helical structure. While double and multiple helix structures appear widely in nature, only rarely are these found in…
The strongly repulsive core of the short-range nucleon-nucleon interaction leads to the existence of high-momentum nucleons in nuclei. Inclusive electron scattering can be used to probe these high-momentum nucleons and study the nature of…
We have studied the effect of amino acids on electron attachment properties of DNA nucleobases, taking cytosine as a model system. The equation of motion coupled cluster theory with an extended basis set has been used to simulate the…
Recent experiments have been able to visualise chromosome organization in fast-growing E.coli cells. However, the mechanism underlying the spatio-temporal organization remains poorly understood. We propose that the DNA adopts a specific…
Protein-mediated interactions are ubiquitous in the cellular environment, and particularly in the nucleus, where they are responsible for the structuring of chromatin. We show through molecular--dynamics simulations of a polymer surrounded…
Complexity metrics and machine learning (ML) models have been utilized to analyze the lengths of segmental genomic entities like: exons, introns, intergenic and repeat/unique DNA sequences, in each of the 22 human chromosomes. The purpose…
A solid-state nanopore can electrophoretically capture a DNA molecule and pull it through in a folded configuration. The resulting ionic current signal indicates where along its length the DNA was captured. A statistical study using an 8 nm…
This work addresses the question of the interplay of DNA demixing and supercoiling in bacterial cells. Demixing of DNA from other globular macromolecules results from the overall repulsion between all components of the system and leads to…
The scaling properties of DNA knots of different complexities were studied by atomic force microscope. Following two different protocols DNA knots are adsorbed onto a mica surface in regimes of (i) strong binding, that induces a kinetic…