Related papers: Exons, introns and DNA thermodynamics
The genetic code is the function from the set of codons to the set of amino acids by which a DNA sequence encodes proteins. Since the codons also influence the shape of the DNA molecule itself, the same sequence that encodes a protein also…
DNA supercoiling plays an important role in a variety of cellular processes. The torsional stress related with supercoiling may be also involved in gene regulation through the local structure and dynamics of the double helix. To check this…
The birth of new genes is an important motor of evolutionary innovation. Whereas many new genes arise by gene duplication, others originate at genomic regions that do not contain any gene or gene copy. Some of these newly expressed genes…
Proteins are a matter of dual nature. As a physical object, a protein molecule is a folded chain of amino acids with multifarious biochemistry. But it is also an instantiation along an evolutionary trajectory determined by the function…
Gene expression and regulation rely on an apparently finely tuned set of reactions between some proteins and DNA. Such DNA-binding proteins have to find specific sequences on very long DNA molecules and they mostly do so in absence of any…
Scientists have been trying to identify all of the genes in the human genome since the initial draft of the genome was published in 2001. Over the intervening years, much progress has been made in identifying protein-coding genes, and the…
A eukaryotic gene consists of multiple exons (protein coding regions) and introns (non-coding regions), and a splice junction refers to the boundary between a pair of exon and intron. Precise identification of spice junctions on a gene is…
Several recent experiments suggest that sharply bent DNA has a surprisingly high bending flexibility, but the cause of this flexibility is poorly understood. Although excitation of flexible defects can explain these results, whether such…
This paper considers the behavior of discrete and continuous mathematical models for gene expression in the presence of transcriptional/translational bursting. We treat this problem in generality with respect to the distribution of the…
A kinetic theory is developed for exonuclease-deficient DNA polymerases, based on the experimental observation that the rates depend not only on the newly incorporated nucleotide, but also on the previous one, leading to the growth of…
Transcription factors (TFs) exert their regulatory action by binding to DNA with specific sequence preferences. However, different TFs can partially share their binding sequences due to their common evolutionary origin. This `redundancy' of…
Kinetic theory and thermodynamics are applied to DNA polymerases with exonuclease activity, taking into account the dependence of the rates on the previously incorportated nucleotide. The replication fidelity is shown to increase…
Genetic sequences are known to possess non-trivial composition together with symmetries in the frequencies of their components. Recently, it has been shown that symmetry and structure are hierarchically intertwined in DNA, suggesting a…
The thermodynamical properties of heterogeneous DNA sequences are computed by path integral techniques applied to a nonlinear model Hamiltonian. The base pairs relative displacements are interpreted as time dependent paths whose amplitudes…
The development of new techniques to quantitatively measure gene expression in cells has shed light on a number of systems that display oscillations in protein concentration. Here we review the different mechanisms which can produce…
Important aspects of the process of information storage and retrieval in DNA and RNA, and its evolution, are the role of the anticodons and associated $t$RNA's, and correlations between anticodons and amino acids; the degeneracy of the…
The evolutionary reason for the increase in gene length from archaea to prokaryotes to eukaryotes observed in large scale genome sequencing efforts has been unclear. We propose here that the increasing complexity of protein-protein…
Background: Transposed elements (TEs) are known to affect transcriptomes, because either new exons are generated from intronic transposed elements (this is called exonization), or the element inserts into the exon, leading to a new…
There is increasing evidence that protein binding to specific sites along DNA can activate the reading out of genetic information without coming into direct physical contact with the gene. There also is evidence that these distant but…
The ongoing effort to detect and characterize physical entanglement in biopolymers has so far established that knots are present in many globular proteins and also abound in viral DNA packaged inside bacteriophages. RNA molecules, on the…