Single-molecule force spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate the forces
and motions associated with biological molecules and enzymatic activity. The most common …

▪ Abstract On laboratory time scales, the energy landscape of a weak bond along a
dissociation pathway is fully explored through Brownian-thermal excitations, and energy …

The elastic properties of DNA are essential for its biological function. They control its
bending and twisting as well as the induction of structural modifications in the molecule …

RNA plays myriad roles in the transmission and regulation of genetic information that are
fundamentally constrained by its mechanical properties, including the elasticity and …

Type II DNA topoisomerases are ubiquitous ATP-dependent enzymes capable of
transporting a DNA through a transient double-strand break in a second DNA segment. This …

Magnetic tweezers are a powerful tool to manipulate single DNA or RNA molecules and to
study nucleic acid-protein interactions in real time. Here, we have modeled the magnetic …

In this paper we review the biophysics revealed by stretching single biopolymers. During the
last decade various techniques have emerged allowing micromanipulation of single …

Soft condensed matter physics, which emerged as a distinct branch of physics in the 1990s,
studies complex fluids: liquids in which structures with length scale between the molecular …

Supercoiling impacts DNA replication, transcription, protein binding to DNA, and the three-
dimensional organization of chromosomes. However, there are currently no methods to …

The double-stranded nature of DNA links its replication, transcription and repair to rotational
motion and torsional strain. Magnetic tweezers (MT) are a powerful single-molecule …