Following the discovery of the double helix DNA by Watson and Crick, the structure and elasticity of DNA has been investigated on various length scales.
These long macromolecules which carry the huge amount of information of living creatures, behave very similar to classical elastic rod in macroscopic scales, but in nano scales the microscopic anisotropies can affect their structures.
A model for nucleosome sliding
The DNA of eukaryotic cells has typically macroscopic lengths but needs to fit inside micron-sized cell nuclei. To achieve this, eukaryotic DNA is hierarchically folded with the help of proteins into the chromatin complex. The tight wrapping of nucleosomal DNA around the histone octamers raises the question of how other DNA binding proteins can bind...
Structure of a semiflexible polymer chain in spherical confinement
In the recent years conformation of the polymers inside confined structures has been investigated widely. A category of these studies is polymer packaging in which a polymer chain is encapsulated inside a confined space. The examples of these highly confined structures are naturally found in viral capsids where a DNA strand is packed inside a...