Related papers: Role of Polymer Loops in DNA Replication
Biopolymer length regulation is a complex process that involves a large number of subprocesses acting simultaneously across multiple spatial and temporal scales. An illustrative example important for genomic stability is the length…
Ring polymers are prevalent in natural and engineered systems, including circular bacterial DNA, crown ethers for cation chelation, and mechanical nanoswitches. The morphology and dynamics of ring polymers are governed by the chemistry and…
G-quadruplexes are non-canonical DNA structures rather ubiquitous in human genome, which are thought to play a crucial role in the development of 85-90 % of cancers. Here, we present a novel coarse-grained approach in modeling…
Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these…
The mechanical properties of DNA play a critical role in many biological functions. For example, DNA packing in viruses involves confining the viral genome in a volume (the viral capsid) with dimensions that are comparable to the DNA…
We scrutinize the effect of polyvalent ions on polymer-DNA interactions. We extend a recently developed test charge theory to the case of a stiff polymer interacting with a DNA molecule in an electrolyte mixture. The theory accounts for…
Motivated by the problem of domain formation in chromosomes, we studied a co--polymer model where only a subset of the monomers feel attractive interactions. These monomers are displaced randomly from a regularly-spaced pattern, thus…
The presence of nanoparticles in a diblock copolymer leads to changes in the morphology and properties of the matrix and can produce highly organized hybrid materials. The resulting material properties depend not only on the polymer…
In a variety of situations, isolated polymer molecules are found in a vacuum and here we examine their properties. Angular momentum conservation is shown to significantly alter the average size of a chain and its conservation is only broken…
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…
We investigate by means of a number of different dynamical Monte Carlo simulation methods the self-assembly of equilibrium polymers in dilute, semidilute and concentrated solutions under good-solvent conditions. In our simulations, both…
Some recent results on the rotational dynamics of polymers are reviewed and extended. We focus here on the relaxation of a polymer, either flexible or semiflexible, initially wrapped around a rigid rod. We also study the steady polymer…
The human genome contains repetitive DNA at different level of sequence length, number and dispersion. Highly repetitive DNA is particularly rich in homo-- and di--nucleotide repeats, while middle repetitive DNA is rich of families of…
We observed reptation of single DNA molecules in fused silica nanoslits of sub-30 nm height. The reptation behavior and the effect of confinement are quantitatively characterized using orientation correlation and transverse fluctuation…
DNA is emerging as an increasingly attractive medium for data storage due to a number of important and unique advantages it offers, most notably the unprecedented durability and density. While the technology is evolving rapidly, the…
The equilibrium three dimensional shape of relatively short loops of DNA is studied using an elastic model that takes into account anisotropy in bending rigidities. Using a reasonable estimate for the anisotropy, it is found that cyclized…
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…
The possible role of quantum effects in transfer of genetic information is studied. It's argued that the nucleotides selection during DNA replication is performed by means of proton tunneling between nucleotide and DNA-polimerase bound by…
We study the conformational properties of complex polymer macromolecules, consisting in general of $n$ subsequently connected chains (blocks) of different lengths and distinct chemical structure. Depending on the solvent conditions, the…
In Escherichia coli (E. coli), entropic repulsion between the two daughter DNA ring polymers under cylindrical confinement is believed to be an important factor governing chromosomal segregation. The repulsion can be enhanced by topological…