Related papers: A model for codon position bias in RNA editing
Deprivation of essential nutrients can have stark consequences for many processes in a cell. We consider amino acid starvation, which can result in bottlenecks in mRNA translation when ribosomes stall due to lack of resources, i.e. tRNAs…
MicroRNAs are endogenous non-coding RNAs which negatively regulate the expression of protein-coding genes in plants and animals. They are known to play an important role in several biological processes and, together with transcription…
The structure of an RNA molecule plays a significant role in its biological function. Predicting structure given a one dimensional sequence of RNA nucleotide bases is a difficult and important problem. Many computer programs (known as in…
It is generally difficult to predict the positions of mutations in genomic DNA at the nucleotide level. Retroviral DNA insertion is one mode of mutation, resulting in host infections that are difficult to treat. This mutation process…
Transcription regulation is largely governed by the profile and the dynamics of transcription factors' binding to DNA. Stochastic effects are intrinsic to this dynamics and the binding to functional sites must be controled with a certain…
We model and discuss advantages of pan-editing, the complex way of expressing mitochondrial genes in kinetoplastids. The rapid spread and preservation of pan-editing seems to be due to its concomitant fragment dispersal. Such dispersal…
RNAs self-interact through hydrogen-bond base-pairing between nucleotides and fold into specific, stable structures that substantially govern their biochemical behaviour. Experimental characterization of these structures remains difficult,…
DNA is a leading candidate as the next archival storage media due to its density, durability and sustainability. To read (and write) data DNA storage exploits technology that has been developed over decades to sequence naturally occurring…
Even under constant external conditions, the expression levels of genes fluctuate. Much emphasis has been placed on the components of this noise that are due to randomness in transcription and translation; here we analyze the role of noise…
The unconstrained genomic DNA of bacteria forms a coil, which volume exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Since prokaryotes lack a membrane-bound nucleus, in sharp contrast with eukaryotes, the DNA may consequently be expected to…
The dynamics of gene transcription is tightly regulated in eukaryotes. Recent experiments have revealed various kinds of transcriptional dynamics, such as RNA polymerase II pausing, that involves regulation at the transcription initiation…
DNA supercoiling is central to many fundamental processes of living organisms. Its average level along the chromosome and over time reflects the dynamic equilibrium of opposite activities of topoisomerases, which are required to relax…
RNA molecules follow a succession of enzyme-mediated processing steps from transcription until maturation. The participating enzymes, for example the spliceosome for mRNAs and Drosha and Dicer for microRNAs, are also produced in the cell…
The genetic material of a eukaryotic cell comprises both nuclear DNA (ncDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). These differ markedly in several aspects but nevertheless must encode proteins that are compatible with one another. Here we…
In biology, predicting RNA secondary structures plays a vital role in determining its physical and chemical properties. Although we have powerful energy models to predict them as well as parametric analysis to understand the models…
Ribosome is a molecular machine that polymerizes a protein where the sequence of the amino acid residues, the monomers of the protein, is dictated by the sequence of codons (triplets of nucleotides) on a messenger RNA (mRNA) that serves as…
We present Brownian dynamics simulations of the facilitated diffusion of a protein, modelled as a sphere with a binding site on its surface, along DNA, modelled as a semi-flexible polymer. We consider both the effect of DNA organisation in…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
Predicting the future evolutionary trajectory of SARS-CoV-2 remains a critical challenge, particularly due to the pivotal role of spike protein mutations. It is therefore essential to develop evolutionary models capable of continuously…
Inspired by RNA-editing as occurs in transcriptional processes in the living cell, we introduce an abstract notion of string adjustment, called guided rewriting. This formalism allows simultaneously inserting and deleting elements. We prove…