Related papers: Exons, introns and DNA thermodynamics
Most bacteriophages are known to inject their double-stranded DNA into bacteria upon receptor binding in an essentially spontaneous way. This downhill thermodynamic process from the intact virion toward the empty viral capsid plus released…
When pulled along its axis, double-stranded DNA elongates abruptly at a force of about 65 pN. Two physical pictures have been developed to describe this overstretched state. The first proposes that strong forces induce a phase transition to…
During the eukaryotic cell cycle, chromatin undergoes several conformational changes, which are believed to play key roles in gene expression regulation during interphase, and in genome replication and division during mitosis. In this…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes that bind at distal DNA sites plays a central role in many cellular processes, such as transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review the basic thermodynamic…
We study the thermal evolution of neutron stars in the presence of hyperons or kaons in the core. Our results indicate that the nucleon and hyperon direct Urca processes play crucial roles for the cooling of neutron stars. The presence of…
The genetic code is the set of rules by which information encoded in genetic material (DNA or RNA sequences) is translated into proteins (amino acid sequences) by living cells. The code defines a mapping between tri-nucleotide sequences,…
During evolution of microorganisms genomes underwork have different changes in their lengths, gene orders, and gene contents. Investigating these structural rearrangements helps to understand how genomes have been modified over time. Some…
We define new profiles based on hydropathy properties and point out specific profiles for regions surrounding splice sites. We built a set T of flanking regions of genes with 1-3 introns from 21st and 22nd chromosomes. These genes contained…
The accurate prediction and characterization of DNA melting domains by computational tools could facilitate a broad range of biological applications. However, no algorithm for melting domain prediction has been available until now. The main…
In the crowded eukaryotic nucleus, euchromatin and heterochromatin segregate into distinct compartments, a phenomenon often attributed to homotypic interactions mediated by liquid liquid phase separation of chromatin associated proteins.…
We present a statistical model of bacterial evolution based on the coupling between codon usage and tRNA abundance. Such a model interprets this aspect of the evolutionary process as a balance between the codon homogenization effect due to…
The thermodynamical stability of DNA minicircles is investigated by means of path integral techniques. Hydrogen bonds between base pairs on complementary strands can be broken by thermal fluctuations and temporary fluctuational openings…
The nature of the quantitative distribution of the 64 DNA codons in the human genome has been an issue of debate for over a decade. Some groups have proposed that the quantitative distribution of the DNA codons ordered as a rank-frequency…
Eukaryotic DNA is packaged into chromatin: one-dimensional arrays of nucleosomes separated by stretches of linker DNA are folded into 30-nm chromatin fibers which in turn form higher-order structures. Each nucleosome, the fundamental unit…
Eukaryotic cells are often exposed to fluctuations in growth conditions as well as endogenous and exogenous stress-related agents. In addition, during development global patterns of gene transcription change dramatically, and these changes…
Thermal unfolding of proteins is compared to folding and mechanical stretching in a simple topology-based dynamical model. We define the unfolding time and demonstrate its low-temperature divergence. Below a characteristic temperature,…
We introduce a model of DNA sequence evolution which can account for biases in mutation rates that depend on the identity of the neighboring bases. An analytic solution for this class of non-equilibrium models is developed by adopting…
The majority of the proteins encoded in the genomes of eukaryotes contain more than one domain. Reasons for high prevalence of multi-domain proteins in various organisms have been attributed to higher stability and functional and folding…
Zero mode waveguide technology of next generation sequencing demonstrated sequence-dependence of the enzymatic reaction, incorporating a base into the genomic DNA. We show that these experimental results indicate existence of a previously…
Alternative splicing allows an organism to make different proteins in different cells at different times, all from the same gene. In a cell that uses alternative splicing, the total length of all the exons is much shorter than in a cell…