Related papers: Probing complex RNA structures by mechanical force
We investigate the unfolding pathway of a cytosine-rich DNA hairpin structure via Molecular Dynamics simulations. Our results indicate a hidden complexity present in the unfolding process. W e show that this complex behavior arises due to…
Double-stranded DNA `overstretches' at a pulling force of about 65 pN, increasing in length by a factor of 1.7. The nature of the overstretched state is unknown, despite its considerable importance for DNA's biological function and…
Stochastic resonance (SR) is a well known phenomenon in dynamical systems. It consists of the amplification and optimization of the response of a system assisted by stochastic noise. Here we carry out the first experimental study of SR in…
Single molecule experiments on bacteriophages show an exponential scaling for the dependence of mobility on the length of DNA within the capsid. It has been suggested that this could be due to the "capstan mechanism" -- the exponential…
The dynamics of polymer translocation through a pore has been the subject of recent theoretical and experimental works. We have considered theoretical estimates and performed computer simulations to understand the mechanism of DNA uptake…
Stochastic modeling of transcription is a classic yet long-standing problem in theoretical biophysics. The lack of unified results and a computationally efficient approach for a general, fine-grained transcription model has confined…
We study the behaviour of double-stranded RNA under twist and tension using oxRNA, a recently developed coarse-grained model of RNA. Introducing explicit salt-dependence into the model allows us to directly compare our results to data from…
Some important biomolecules (for instance, bacterial FtsZ and eukaryotic DNA) are known to posses spontaneous (intrinsic) curvature. Using a simple extension of the wormlike chain model, we study the response of a weakly bending filament in…
Colloidal particles grafted with single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) chains can self-assemble into a number of different crystalline structures, where hybridization of the ssDNA chains creates links between colloids stabilizing their structure.…
We propose a formalism for deriving force-elongation and elongation-force relations for flexible chain molecules from analytical expressions for their radial distribution function, which provides insight into the factors controlling the…
Background: We study the sparsification of dynamic programming folding algorithms of RNA structures. Sparsification applies to the mfe-folding of RNA structures and can lead to a significant reduction of time complexity. Results: We analyze…
Non-coding RNAs are ubiquitous, but the discovery of new RNA gene sequences far outpaces research on their structure and functional interactions. We mine the evolutionary sequence record to derive precise information about function and…
The increasing importance of RNA as a prime player in biology can hardly be overstated. Problems in RNA, such as folding and RNA-RNA interactions that drive phase separation, require cations. Because experiments alone cannot reveal the…
RNA polymerase (RNAP) is molecular machine that polymerizes a RNA molecule, a linear heteropolymer, using a single stranded DNA (ssDNA) as the corresponding template; the sequence of monomers of the RNA is dictated by that of monomers on…
The formation of secondary structures by a random RNA sequence is studied as a model system for the sequence-structure problem omnipresent in biopolymers. Several toy energy models are introduced to allow detailed analytical and numerical…
Availability of high-resolution crystal structures of ribosomal subunits of different species opens a route to investigate about molecular interactions between its constituents and stabilization strategy. Structural analysis of the small…
Emerging evidence suggests that the introns and intergenic sequences of the genomes of higher eukaryotes (the ``junk'' DNA) codes for a vast, RNA-based, genetic regulatory network. It is believed that this network is responsible for the…
RNA secondary structure prediction is widely used to understand RNA function. Recently, there has been a shift away from the classical minimum free energy (MFE) methods to partition function-based methods that account for folding ensembles…
DNA supercoiling, the under or overwinding of DNA, is a key physical mechanism both participating to compaction of bacterial genomes and making genomic sequences adopt various structural forms. DNA supercoiling may lead to the formation of…
We introduce a coarse-grained model of DNA with bases modeled as rigid-body ellipsoids to capture their anisotropic stereochemistry. Interaction potentials are all physicochemical and generated from all-atom simulation/parameterization with…