Twist Neutrality and the Diameter of the Nucleosome Core Particle

2011/02/21 by J. Bohr, Jakob Bohr, Kasper Olsen · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Core (optical fiber) #DNA #DNA and Nucleic Acid Chemistry #Diffusion and Search Dynamics #Genetics #Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics #Geometry #Histone #Mathematics #Nucleosome #Optics #Particle (ecology) #Physics #Twist #cond-mat.soft #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.BM

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.108.098101

published in Physical Review Letters 108(9), 098101 (American Physical Society) · 11 pages, 5 figures; v2: minor modifications

arxiv created 2011/02/21 · openalex publication_date 2012/02/27 · arxiv updated 2015/03/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

The diameter of the nucleosome core particle is the same for all the eukaryotes. Here we discuss the possibility that this selectiveness is consistent with a propensity for twist neutrality, in particular, for the double helical DNA to stay rotationally neutral when strained. Reorganization of DNA cannot be done without some level of temporal tensile stress, and as a consequence chiral molecules, such as helices, will twist under strain. The requirement that the nucleosome, constituting the nucleosome core particle and linker DNA, has a vanishing strain-twist coupling leads to a requirement for the amount of bending. For the diameter of the coiled DNA we obtain the relatively accurate numerical estimate of 2R=82 Å.

Citations

• The language of covalent histone modifications
• Chromatin Structure: A Repeating Unit of Histones and DNA
• Self-Linking and the Gauss Integral in Higher Dimensions
• Charge State of the Globular Histone Core Controls Stability of the Nucleosome
• Crystal structure of the nucleosome core particle at 2.8 Å resolution
• Structure of the yeast nucleosome core particle reveals fundamental changes in internucleosome interactions
• Polymer Reptation and Nucleosome Repositioning