Related papers: DNA properties investigated by dynamic force micro…
Periodic assemblies of nanoparticles are central to surface patterning, with applications in biosensing, energy conversion, and nanofabrication. Evaporation of colloidal droplets on substrates provides a simple yet effective route to…
We present a simple model which describes elastic response of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) to stretching, including the regime of very high force (up to 1000 pN). ssDNA is modelled as a discreet persistent chain, whose ground state is a…
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…
Several controversial issues concerning the packing of linear DNA in bacteriophages and globules are discussed. Exact relations for the osmotic pressure, capsid pressure and loading force are derived in terms of the hole size inside phages…
Optical forces acting on nano-sized particles are typically too small to be useful for particle manipulation. We theoretically and numerically demonstrate a mechanism that can significantly enhance the optical force acting on a small…
In living systems, DNA undergoes continuous and rhythmic mechanical remodeling through condensation, looping, and disentangling to regulate gene expression, segregate chromosomes, and guide morphogenesis. Here, we demonstrate a purely…
Specific binding of proteins to DNA is one of the most common ways in which gene expression is controlled. Although general rules for the DNA-protein recognition can be derived, the ambiguous and complex nature of this mechanism precludes a…
There is now a certain consensus that Transcription Factors (TFs) reach their target sites, where they regulate gene transcription, via a mechanism dubbed facilitated diffusion (FD). In FD, the TF cycles between events of 3D-diffusion in…
Complementary strands in DNA double helix show temporary fluctuational openings which are essential to biological functions such as transcription and replication of the genetic information. Such large amplitude fluctuations, known as the…
We present a comprehensive theoretical and experimental study of the solution phase properties of DNA-based family of nanoparticles - dendrimer-like DNA molecules (DL-DNA). These charged DNA dendrimers are novel macromolecular aggregates,…
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…
We report the development of a scanning force microscope based on an ultra-sensitive silicon nitride membrane transducer. Our development is made possible by inverting the standard microscope geometry - in our instrument, the substrate is…
A double stranded DNA molecule under the stress of a pulling force acting on the strand terminals exhibits a partially denatured structure or can be completely unzipped depending the magnitude of the pulling force. A scaling argument for…
Molecular dynamics simulations are often used to provide feedback in the design workflow of DNA nanostructures. However, even with coarse-grained models, convergence of distributions from unbiased simulation is slow, limiting applications…
We study the features on the unzipping process of a modified version of the Peyrard-Bishop- Dauxois model. We show that the inclusion of a barrier in the on-site potential allows for the existence of stable domain wall solutions between…
Motivated by recent experiments we have studied the optical conductivity of DNA in its natural environment containing water molecules and counter ions. Our density functional theory calculations (using SIESTA) for four base pair B-DNA with…
Graphene nanopore based sensor devices are exhibiting the great potential for the detection of DNA. To understand the fundamental aspects of DNA translocating through a graphene nanopore, in this work, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations…
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 pervasive phenomenon of friction has been studied at the nanoscale by controlled manipulation of single atoms and molecules, which permitted a precise determination of the static friction force necessary to initiate motion. However,…
Modeling of DNA-protein interactions is a complex process involving many important time and length scales. This can be facilitated through the use of coarse-grained models which reduce the number of degrees of freedom and allow efficient…