Roland Netz, TU Munich
The dynamics of DNA involves thermal, elastic and hydrodynamic effects on different length and time scales, theoretical approaches thus rely on a combination of simulations, theory and scaling: - The local dynamics of DNA is scale dependent and exhibits elastic effects, hydrodynamic interactions and center-of-mass dynamics as one goes from smaller to larger scales. A dynamic mean-field approach is validated by hydrodynamic simulations and quantitatively compare with recent fluorescence-correlation spectroscopy data. Problems in experimental data are discerned. - In modern single-molecule force-spectroscopic studies of RNA or protein unfolding DNA functions as force-transducer. Extracting folding landscapes and transition rates requires a novel dynamic deconvolution approach. The dynamic response functions of DNA needed for this are supplied by theory.