Related papers: Stretching single RNAs: exact numerical and stocha…
Single-molecule experiments provide new insights into biological processes hitherto not accessible by measurements performed on bulk systems. We report on a study of the kinetics of a triple-branch DNA molecule with four conformational…
The process of RNA base fraying (i.e. the transient opening of the termini of a helix) is involved in many aspects of RNA dynamics. We here use molecular dynamics simulations and Markov state models to characterize the kinetics of RNA…
We study the conformations of polymer chains in a poor solvent, with and without bending rigidity, by means of a simple statistical mechanics model. This model can be exactly solved for chains of length up to N=55 using exact enumeration…
The computer-aided folding of biomolecules, particularly RNAs, is one of the most difficult challenges in computational structural biology. RNA tetraloops are fundamental RNA motifs playing key roles in RNA folding and RNA-RNA and…
We examine the focusing of kinetic energy and the amplification of various quantities during the snapping motion of the free end of a flexible structure. This brief but violent event appears to be a regularized finite-time singularity, with…
We study the elastic properties of a single A/B copolymer chain with a specific sequence. We predict a rich structure in the force extension relations which can be addressed to the sequence. The variational method is introduced to probe…
A detailed stochastic model of single-gene auto-regulation is established and its solutions are explored when mRNA dynamics is fast compared with protein dynamics and in the opposite regime. The model includes all the sources of randomness…
Stochastic resonance (SR) is a well known phenomenon in dynamical systems. It consists of the amplification and optimization of the response of a system assisted by stochastic noise. Here we carry out the first experimental study of SR in…
Experiments show that when a monolayer of cells cultured on an elastic substrate is subject to a cyclic stretch, cells tend to re-orient either perpendicularly or at an oblique angle with respect to the main direction of the stretch. Due to…
Using the atomic force microscope based break junction approach, applicable to metal point contacts and single molecule junctions, measurements can be repeated thousands of times resulting in rich data sets characterizing the properties of…
Many proteins interact with and deform double-stranded DNA in cells. Single-molecule experiments have studied the elasticity of DNA with helix-deforming proteins, including proteins that bend DNA. These experiments increase the need for…
Recent computational efforts have shown that the current potential energy models used in molecular dynamics are not accurate enough to describe the conformational ensemble of RNA oligomers and suggest that molecular dynamics should be…
We study the effects of the shear force on the rupture mechanism on a double stranded DNA. Motivated by recent experiments, we perform the atomistic simulations with explicit solvent to obtain the distributions of extension in hydrogen and…
The twisting deformation of mechanically stretched DNA molecules is studied by a coarse grained Hamiltonian model incorporating the fundamental interactions that stabilize the double helix and accounting for the radial and angular base pair…
Single molecule experiments on B-DNA stretching have revealed one or two structural transitions, when increasing the external force. They are characterized by a sudden increase of DNA contour length and a decrease of the bending rigidity.…
We study the behaviour of double-stranded RNA under twist and tension using oxRNA, a recently developed coarse-grained model of RNA. Introducing explicit salt-dependence into the model allows us to directly compare our results to data from…
We study the melting of a double stranded DNA in the presence of stretching forces, via 3D Monte-Carlo simulations, exactly solvable models and heuristic arguments. The resulting force-temperature phase diagram is dramatically different for…
The computational study of conformational transitions in nucleic acids still faces many challenges. For example, in the case of single stranded RNA tetranucleotides, agreement between simulations and experiments is not satisfactory due to…
Single-cell RNA-seq data are challenging because of the sparseness of the read counts, the tiny expression of many relevant genes, and the variability in the efficiency of RNA extraction for different cells. We consider a simple…
Formation of base pairs between the nucleotides of an RNA sequence gives rise to a complex and often highly branched RNA structure. While numerous studies have demonstrated the functional importance of the high degree of RNA branching --…