Title

Sedimentation of macroscopic rigid knots and its relation to gel electrophoretic mobility of DNA knots

Department/School

Mathematics

Date

1-21-2013

Document Type

Article

Keywords

macroscopic rigid knots, DNA knots

Abstract

We address the general question of the extent to which the hydrodynamic behaviour of microscopic freely fluctuating objects can be reproduced by macrosopic rigid objects. In particular, we compare the sedimentation speeds of knotted DNA molecules undergoing gel electrophoresis to the sedimentation speeds of rigid stereolithographic models of ideal knots in both water and silicon oil. We find that the sedimentation speeds grow roughly linearly with the average crossing number of the ideal knot configurations, and that the correlation is stronger within classes of knots. This is consistent with previous observations with DNA knots in gel electrophoresis.

Volume

3

Published in

Scientific Reports

Citation/Other Information

Weber, C., Carlen, M., Dietler, G., Rawdon, E. J., & Stasiak, A. (2013). Sedimentation of macroscopic rigid knots and its relation to gel electrophoretic mobility of DNA knots. Scientific Reports, 3: 1091. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01091

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