Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 15: Postersession III

BP 15.83: Poster

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 14:00–16:00, Poster B

Statistical Mechanics of the Bacterial Chromosome — •Jacqueline Janssen, Joris Messelink, and Chase Broedersz — Arnold-Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Theresienstraße 37, 80333 München

The bacterial DNA outsizes the cell by roughly a factor of a thousand. The DNA must not only be highly condensed to fit inside the cell, but this condensed DNA must also be organized inside the cell to facilitate functional processes of the chromosome. Thus, understanding the three-dimensional spatial organization of the bacterial chromosome is important to understanding how the core biological processes are regulated inside of the cell. Recent chromosome conformation capture experiments provide genome-wide data on chromosome folding. In particular, the Hi-C method provides contact frequency maps of the chromosome, revealing its highly organized structure. We are developing a maximum entropy approach to extract the statistics of the three-dimensional structure of the bacterial chromosome using such data. The aim of our method is to develop a coarse-grained model for the statistical mechanics of the folding of the whole bacterial chromosome.