title: Multilevel deconstruction of the In vivo behavior of looped DNA-protein complexes.
abstract: Protein-DNA complexes with loops play a fundamental role in a wide variety of cellular processes, ranging from the regulation of DNA transcription to telomere maintenance. As ubiquitous as they are, their precise in vivo properties and their integration into the cellular function still remain largely unexplored. Here, we present a multilevel approach that efficiently connects in both directions molecular properties with cell physiology and use it to characterize the molecular properties of the looped DNA-lac repressor complex while functioning in vivo. The properties we uncover include the presence of two representative conformations of the complex, the stabilization of one conformation by DNA architectural proteins, and precise values of the underlying twisting elastic constants and bending free energies. Incorporation of all this molecular information into gene-regulation models reveals an unprecedented versatility of looped DNA-protein complexes at shaping the properties of gene expression.
authors.affiliation: Integrative Biological Modeling Laboratory, Computational Biology Program, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, United States of America.
authors.forename: Leonor
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Saiz
authors.forename: Jose M G
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Vilar
mesh_terms: D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins / Q000737:chemistry / Q000502:physiology*; D011487:Protein Conformation; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; D004247:DNA