Professor Alexander Vologodskii
Department of Chemistry
New York University
Unknown Location

Monday, February 1, 1999
3:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

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.

Tea and coffee will be served in R3151 Beckman Institute at 2:15pm.