Seminar
Computer simulation of topological properties of circular DNAs
Professor Alexander Vologodskii
Department of Chemistry
New York University
Monday, February 1, 1999
3:00 pm
3269 Beckman Institute
One biological problem, the separation of the complementary strands of circular DNA during its replication, will be used to highlight different questions which can be studied by computer simulation. We will introduce a model to study large-scale conformational properties of DNA and describe computational methods which are used to analyze equilibrium statistical properties of the molecules. We introduced a concept of topological equilibrium and show how the quantitative features of this equilibrium can be calculated and measured. We consider how the equilibrium can be shifted in a required direction by DNA supercoiling and how special enzymes, DNA topoisomerases, handle the unlinking problem.