Looping and Clustering: a statistical physics approach to protein-DNA complexes in bacteria

Nils-Ole Walliser (1, 2)

1 L2C - Laboratoire Charles Coulomb
2 SCPN - Systèmes Complexes et Phénomènes Nonlinéaires

The DNA shows a high degree of spatial and dynamical organization over a broad range of length scales. It interacts with different populations of proteins and can form protein-DNA complexes that underlie various biological processes, including chromosome segregation. A prominent example is the large ParB-DNA complex, an essential component of a widely spread mechanism for DNA segregation in bacteria. Recent studies suggest that DNA-bound ParB proteins interact with each other and condense into large clusters with multiple extruding DNA-loops. In my talk, I present the Looping and Clustering model [1], a simple statistical physics approach to describe how proteins assemble into a protein-DNA cluster with multiple loops. Our analytic model predicts binding profiles of ParB proteins in good agreement with data from high precision ChIP-sequencing – a biochemical technique to analyze the interaction between DNA and proteins at the level of the genome. The Looping and Clustering framework provides a quantitative tool that could be exploited to interpret further experimental results of ParB-like protein complexes and gain some new insights into the organization of DNA. [1] Walter, J.-C., Walliser, N.-O., ... & Broedersz, C. P., New J. Phys. 20, 035002 (2018).

Domaines: Biophysique [physics.bio-ph]

Nils-Ole Walliser. Looping and Clustering: a statistical physics approach to protein-DNA complexes in bacteria. APS March Meeting 2019, Mar 2019, Boston, United States. ⟨hal-02106612⟩