Related papers: Nucleosome repositioning via loop formation
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…
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…
Storage and retrieval of the genetic information in cells is a dynamic process that requires the DNA to undergo dramatic structural rearrangements. DNA looping is a prominent example of such a structural rearrangement that is essential for…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes that bind at distal DNA sites plays a central role in many cellular processes, such as transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review the basic thermodynamic…
Heat-induced mobility of nucleosomes along DNA is an experimentally well-studied phenomenon. A recent experiment shows that the repositioning is modified in the presence of minor-groove binding DNA ligands. We present here a stochastic…
DNA is subject to large deformations in a wide range of biological processes. Two key examples illustrate how such deformations influence the readout of the genetic information: the sequestering of eukaryotic genes by nucleosomes, and DNA…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes is ubiquitous to many fundamental cellular processes, including transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review recent advances in understanding the properties of…
We present in this paper an original approach to compute the electrophoretic mobility of rigid nucleo-protein complexes like nucleosomes. This model allows to address theoretically the influence of complex position along DNA, as well as…
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…
Chromatin is a complex of DNA, RNA and proteins whose primary function is to package genomic DNA into the tight confines of a cell nucleus. A fundamental repeating unit of chromatin is the nucleosome, an octamer of histone proteins around…
Histone octamers show a heat-induced mobility along DNA. Recent theoretical studies have established two mechanisms that are qualitatively and quantitatively compatible with in vitro experiments on nucleosome sliding: Octamer repositiong…
Nucleosomes form the basic unit of compaction within eukaryotic genomes and their locations represent an important, yet poorly understood, mechanism of genetic regulation. Quantifying the strength of interactions within the nucleosome is a…
A simple model for the force-dependent unwinding and rewinding rates of the nucleosome inner turn is constructed and quantitatively compared to the results of recent measurements [A. H. Mack et al., J. Mol. Biol. 423, 687 (2012)]. First, a…
We present a statistical-mechanical analysis of the positioning of nucleosomes along one of the chromosomes of yeast DNA as a function of the strength of the binding potential and of the chemical potential of the nucleosomes. We find a…
We use nucleosome maps obtained by high-throughput sequencing to study sequence specificity of intrinsic histone-DNA interactions. In contrast with previous approaches, we employ an analogy between a classical one-dimensional fluid of…
Nucleosome core particle is a dynamic structure -- DNA may transiently peel off the histone octamer surface due to thermal fluctuations or the action of chromatin remodeling enzymes. Partial DNA unwrapping enables easier access of…
Molecular biology explains function of molecules by their geometrical and electronical structures that are mainly determined by utilization of quantum effects in chemistry. However, further quantum effects are not thought to play any…
Living cells provide a fluctuating, out-of-equilibrium environment in which genes must coordinate cellular function. DNA looping, which is a common means of regulating transcription, is very much a stochastic process; the loops arise from…
Large-scale DNA deformation is ubiquitous in transcriptional regulation in prokaryotes and eukaryotes alike. Though much is known about how transcription factors and constellations of binding sites dictate where and how gene regulation will…
In many biochemical processes, proteins bound to DNA at distant sites are brought into close proximity by loops in the underlying DNA. For example, the function of some gene-regulatory proteins depends on such DNA looping interactions. We…