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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 42: Focus: Multiscale Simulations for Soft Matter: The Challenge of Dynamics (joint session CPP/DY, organized by CPP)
DY 42.5: Invited Talk
Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 16:00–16:30, H51
A coarse-grained model for DNA: dynamics of self-assembling biological systems and nanostructures. — •Ard Louis — Theoretical Physics, University of Oford
DNA is a particularly promising candidate for large-scale self-assembly because the specific binding of DNA bases can be accurately designed to build dynamic structures on the nanoscale with atomic precision. Inside the cell, DNA not only stores information in a digital code, but controls its readout by subtle modulation of its dynamic properties.
To study processes on these time and length-scales we employ oxDNA[1], a nucleotide level coarse-grained model that can model dynamical DNA structures with thousands of nucleotides. We are able to accurately reproduce the dynamics of exchange reactions, a key component of dynamic DNA nanotechnology, and also make detailed predictions for the hybridization dynamics of DNA duplexes. Larger structures such as a DNA nanobot can also be studied. For the dynamics of large-scale addressable assemblies, we develop a new multi-scale technique. As is the case for many other coarse-grained systems, correctly interpreting dynamical results is subtle[2].
[1] http://dna.phyiscs.ox.ac.uk [2] J.T. Padding and A.A. Louis, Phys, E 74, 031402 (2006)