The many faces of DNA [EXTRAORDINARY Nodes Seminar]

After water and oxygen, DNA is arguably the most famous molecule of life. This is not surprising, as the eye-catching double helix carries the instructions necessary to manufacture and assemble all the components of a living organism. However, the wealth of information encoded in DNA often overshadows its unusual physical properties, such as same-charge attraction. In this lecture, I will describe my lab’s efforts to characterize DNA's physical properties through high-end computer simulations. Topics to be covered include inside-out conformational dynamics of DNA, DNA packaging in viruses, and applications of DNA in nanotechnology. The lecture will illustrate how high-end computer simulations can reveal information inaccessible to experiment and provide a forward-looking perspective on modeling an entire biological cell at the all-atom resolution.