Related papers: A composite model for DNA torsion dynamics
We study the static and dynamical properties of DNA in the vicinity of its melting transition, i.e. the separation of the two strands upon heating. The investigation is based on a simple mechanical model which includes the helicoidal…
Crossover motifs are integral components for designing DNA based nanostructures and nanomechanical devices due to their enhanced rigidity compared to the normal B-DNA. Although the structural rigidity of the double helix B-DNA has been…
We reinvestigate the model originally studied by Neukirch and Marko that describes the extension, torque and supercoiling in single, stretched and twisted DNA molecules, which consists of a mixture of extended and supercoiled state, using…
We construct and analyze monomeric and multimeric models of the stochastic disassembly of a single nucleosome. Our monomeric model predicts the time needed for a number of histone-DNA contacts to spontaneously break, leading to dissociation…
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…
We report an accurate method to determine DNA barcodes from the dwell time measurement of protein tags (barcodes) along the DNA backbone using Brownian dynamics simulation of a model DNA and use a recursive theoretical scheme which improves…
We propose that semiflexible polymers in poor solvent collapse in two stages. The first stage is the well known formation of a dense toroidal aggregate. However, if the solvent is sufficiently poor, the condensate will undergo a second…
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…
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…
Polymer composites are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, owing to their emergent desirable mechanical properties not attainable in single-species systems. At the same time, polymer topology has been shown to play a key role in…
We evaluate, by means of molecular dynamics simulations employing a realistic DNA coarse-grained model, the phase behaviour and the structural and dynamic properties of tetravalent DNA nanostars, i.e. nanoconstructs completely made of DNA.…
The denaturation of the double helix is a template for fundamental biological functions such as replication and transcription involving the formation of local fluctuational openings. The denaturation transition is studied for heterogeneous…
The melting behavior of long, heterogeneous DNA chains is examined within the framework of the nonlinear lattice dynamics based Peyrard-Bishop-Dauxois (PBD) model. Data for the pBR322 plasmid and the complete T7 phage have been used to…
The importance of nonlinearities in material constitutive relations has long been appreciated in the continuum mechanics of macroscopic rods. Although the moment (torque) response to bending is almost universally linear for small deflection…
Organization and maintenance of the chromosomal DNA in living cells strongly depends on the DNA interactions with a plethora of DNA-binding proteins. Single-molecule studies show that formation of nucleoprotein complexes on DNA by such…
Using a Brownian dynamics simulation, we numerically studied the interaction of DNA with histone and proposed an octamer-rotation model to describe the process of nucleosome formation. Nucleosome disruption under stretching was also…
Anomalous non-exponential relaxation in hydrated biomolecules is commonly attributed to the complexity of the free-energy landscapes, similarly to polymers and glasses. It was found recently that the hydrogen-bond breathing of terminal DNA…
From a nanoscience perspective, cellular processes and their reduced in vitro imitations provide extraordinary examples for highly robust few or single molecule reaction pathways. A prime example are biochemical reactions involving DNA…
We present Brownian dynamics simulations of the facilitated diffusion of a protein, modelled as a sphere with a binding site on its surface, along DNA, modelled as a semi-flexible polymer. We consider both the effect of DNA organisation in…
To gain a deeper insight into cellular processes such as transcription and translation, one needs to uncover the mechanisms controlling the configurational changes of nucleic acids. As a step toward this aim, we present here a novel…