The relationship between the survival of Escherichia coli during long-term starvation in rich medium and the supercoiling of a reporter plasmid (pBR322) has been studied. In aerated continuously shaken cultures, E. coli lost the ability to form colonies earlier in rich NaCl-free Luria-Bertani medium than in NaCl-containing medium, and the negative supercoiling of plasmid pBR322 declined more ra...

We predict a novel conformational regime for DNA, where denaturation bubbles form at the tips of plectonemes, and study its properties using coarse-grained simulations. For negative supercoiling, this regime lies between bubble-dominated and plectoneme-dominated phases, and explains the broad transition between the two observed in experiment. Tip bubbles cause localisation of plectonemes within...

DNA gyrase is a target of quinolone antibacterial agents, but the molecular details of the quinolone-gyrase interaction are not clear. Quinolone resistance mutations frequently occur at residues Ser and Asp of the gyrase A subunit, suggesting that these residues are involved in drug binding. Single and double alanine substitutions were created at these positions (Ala, Ala, and Ala Ala), and the...

DNA supercoiling is a major regulator of transcription in bacteria. Negative supercoiling acts both by promoting the formation of nucleoprotein structures containing wrapped DNA and by altering the twist of DNA. The latter affects the initiation of transcription by RNA polymerase as well as recombination processes. Here, we argue that although bacteria and eukaryotes differ in their mode of pac...

Nucleosomes form the unit structure of the genome in eukaryotes, thereby constituting a fundamental tenet of chromatin biology. In canonical nucleosomes, DNA wraps around the histone octamer in a left-handed toroidal ramp. Here, in single-molecule magnetic tweezers studies of chaperone-assisted nucleosome assembly, we show that the handedness of the DNA wrapping around the nucleosome core is in...

The Poland-Scheraga (PS) model for the helix-coil transition of DNA considers the statistical mechanics of the thermally induced binding of two complementary strands of DNA. In this paper, we show how to modify the PS model when a torque is applied to the extremities of DNA: We propose a simple model for the energy of twisted DNA and compute the entropy of a loop, subject to angular constraints...

Transcription of the Bombyx mori fibroin gene in a posterior silk gland extract can be separated into three functional steps on the basis of sensitivity to Sarkosyl: 1) formation of an initiation complex, which is blocked by 0.025% Sarkosyl; 2) conversion of the initiation complex to an elongation complex, a step sensitive to 0.05% Sarkosyl; 3) the subsequent elongation of RNA chain which occur...