I am thrilled to share that two of our papers have been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters on the same day. What a happy coincidence.
The first one marks the first paper in my career in which we combine simulations, theory and experiments to shed some light on the biophysics of cells. All living cells have a problem, the environment where their DNA is stored is typically very crowded and entangled. In order to execute essential tasks such as gene expression and cell division, cells require DNA to be dynamic and to flow. Our findings suggest, for the first time, that bacterial proteins involved in DNA packaging may act as “rheology modifiers” in living cells and modulate the viscosity of their surroundings. Read more in PRL.
The second paper is part of a project that I started by the end of my postdoc in Japan (~2020) in which we tackle a fundamental problem in DNA elasticity. Existing theories of suggest that the bending and twisting persistence lengths of DNA, two quantities related to the DNA stiffness, are constant (under constant salt, PH and temperature conditions). This was supported by single-molecule experiments performed with long DNA molecules. However, recent experiments have reported the high flexibility of short DNA fragments characterised with a short persistence length whose origin and relation to the existing models have been under active debate. In this work we provide a systematic description of the link between models of DNA elasticity at different length scales that helps to elucidate the length dependence elasticity of DNA, and with this, how bulk elastic properties emerge from base-pair fluctuations. Read more in PRL.
