[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Seminar today at 14:00

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Date/Time: Wed 2007-01-24 at 14:00

Location:  Auditorium          

Speaker:   Gautam Menon (Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai)

Title:     Loop Formation in a Model for Short DNA Molecules

Abstract: DNA in a cell comes in the form of long two-stranded molecules, with the two strands arranged in the double-helix form made famous by Watson and Crick. Recent important experiments quantify the ability of short DNA molecules to form closed loops, but the numbers disagree by a factor of more than a thousand with the predictions of simple theoretical models of DNA bending.  It has been suggested that this discrepancy arises because of ``bubbles'', small regions where double-stranded DNA melts into two separated single strands; DNA is more easily bent in the vicinity of a bubble.  Models which incorporate the physics of bubbles in DNA can be used to predict, among other things, the full distribution of the end-to-end vector of the DNA molecule, the optimal location of the bubble and the variation of the probability that a loop forms with the details of the DNA sequence. I will describe recent work of ours which deals with this problem.



Stimulants available 15 minutes before the talk.

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