Related papers: Torsional fluctuations in columnar DNA assemblies
The formation of bubbles in nucleic acids (NAs) are fundamental in many biological processes such as DNA replication, recombination, telomeres formation, nucleotide excision repair, as well as RNA transcription and splicing. These precesses…
The equilibrium structure of a Dinucleosome is studied using an elastic model that takes into account the force and torque balance conditions. Using the proper boundary conditions, it is found that the conformational energy of the problem…
We combine experiments and theory to investigate the dynamics and orientational fluctuations of ferromagnetic microellipsoids that form a ribbon-like structure due to attractive dipolar forces. When assembled in the ribbon, the ellipsoids…
Genetic information is stored in a linear sequence of base-pairs; however, thermal fluctuations and complex DNA conformations such as folds and loops make it challenging to order genomic material for in vitro analysis. In this work, we…
We study the effects of the sequence on the propagation of nonlinear excitations in simple models of DNA, and how those effects are modified by noise. Starting from previous results on soliton dynamics on lattices defined by aperiodic…
The role of thermal pressure fluctuation excited within tightly packaged DNA prior to ejection from protein capsid shells is discussed in a model calculation. At equilibrium before ejection we assume the DNA is folded many times into a…
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
Relying on symmetry considerations appropriate for helical biopolymers such as DNA and filamentous actin, we argue that crystalline packings of mutually repulsive helical macromolecules fall principally into two categories: unfrustrated…
The free energy of looping DNA by proteins and protein complexes determines to what extent distal DNA sites can affect each other. We inferred its in vivo value through a combined computational-experimental approach for different lengths of…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
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…
Conformational change of a DNA molecule is frequently observed in multiple biological processes and has been modelled using a chain of strongly coupled oscillators with a nonlinear bistable potential. While the mechanism and properties of…
It is well known that transcription can induce torsional stress in DNA, affecting the activity of nearby genes or even inducing structural transitions in the DNA duplex. It has long been assumed that the generation of significant torsional…
Under appropriate conditions, mixtures of cationic and neutral lipids and DNA in water condense into complexes in which DNA strands form local 2D smectic lattices intercalated between lipid bilayer membranes in a lamellar stack. These…
There is growing evidence that high-energy scattering processes involving nuclei can offer unique insights into the many-body correlations present in nuclear ground states, in particular those of deformed nuclei. These processes involve,…
Using density-functional theory, we have analyzed the phase behavior of binary mixtures of hard rods of different lengths and diameters. Previous studies have shown a strong tendency of smectic phases of these mixtures to segregate and, in…
To study the elastic properties of rod-like DNA nanostructures, we perform long simulations of these structure using the oxDNA coarse-grained model. By analysing the fluctuations in these trajectories we obtain estimates of the bend and…
Long length-scale structural deformations of DNA play a central role in many biological processes including gene expression. The elastic rod model, which uses a continuum approximation, has emerged as a viable tool to model deformations of…
In the hexagonal columnar phase of chiral polymers a bias towards cholesteric twist competes with braiding along an average direction. When the chirality is strong, topological defects proliferate, leading to either a tilt grain boundary…
We present a computational method to evaluate the end-to-end and the contour length distribution functions of short DNA molecules described by a mesoscopic Hamiltonian. The method generates a large statistical ensemble of possible…