Multiprotein DNA looping

Abstract

DNA looping plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of biological processes, providing the backbone for long range interactions on DNA. Here we develop the first model for DNA looping by an arbitrarily large number of proteins and solve it analytically in the case of identical binding. We uncover a switch-like transition between looped and unlooped phases and identify the key parameters that control this transition. Our results establish the basis for the quantitative understanding of fundamental cellular processes like DNA recombination, gene silencing, and telomere maintenance.

11 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• DNA looping in gene regulation: from the assembly of macromolecular complexes to the control of transcriptional noise
• Inferring the in vivo looping properties of DNA
• Stochastic dynamics of macromolecular-assembly networks

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Non-equilibrium chromosome looping via molecular slip-links
• Extrinsic noise driven phenotype switching in a self-regulating gene
• Systems Biophysics of Gene Expression
• Multilevel Deconstruction of the In Vivo Behavior of Looped DNA-Protein Complexes
• Suppression and enhancement of transcriptional noise by DNA looping
• Lambda-prophage induction modeled as a cooperative failure mode of lytic repression
• Aggregation of amphiphilic polymers in the presence of adhesive small colloidal particles
• A thermodynamic model for agglomeration of DNA-looping proteins