The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Entropy-driven spatial organization of highly confined polymers: Lessons for the bacterial chromosome
Abstract
Despite recent progress in visualization experiments, the mechanism underlying chromosome segregation in bacteria still remains elusive. Here we address a basic physical issue associated with bacterial chromosome segregation, namely the spatial organization of highly confined, self-avoiding polymers (of nontrivial topology) in a rod-shaped cell-like geometry. Through computer simulations, we present evidence that, under strong confinement conditions, topologically distinct domains of a polymer complex effectively repel each other to maximize their conformational entropy, suggesting that duplicated circular chromosomes could partition spontaneously. This mechanism not only is able to account for the spatial separation per se but also captures the major features of the spatiotemporal organization of the duplicating chromosomes observed in Escherichia coli and Caulobacter crescentus .
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Self-organization of domain structures by DNA-loop-extruding enzymes
Alipour, E., & Marko, J. F. (2012) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gks925 · Cited by 540
“It has been proposed that chromosomes might simply occupy maximum-entropy conformations, in the manner of confined random-coil polymers (1,2).”
BackgroundFrom self-assembled vesicles to protocells
Chen, I. A., & Walde, P. (2010) · Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology · doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a002170 · Cited by 256
Looping the Genome with SMC Complexes
Kim, E., Barth, R., & Dekker, C. (2023) · Annual Review of Biochemistry · doi:10.1146/annurev-biochem-032620-110506 · Cited by 96
Chromosome segregation by the Escherichia coli Min system
Di Ventura, B., Knecht, B., Andreas, H., Godinez, W. J., Fritsche, M., Rohr, K., Nickel, W., Heermann, D. W., & Sourjik, V. (2013) · Molecular Systems Biology · doi:10.1038/msb.2013.44 · Cited by 74
Loop-extruders alter bacterial chromosome topology to direct entropic forces for segregation
Harju, J., van Teeseling, M. C. F., & Broedersz, C. P. (2024) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-024-49039-w · Cited by 27
“1A, B), which tend to extend along the long axis of the cell if the cell is suf fi ciently long 5,17,46 .”
Influential
Metadata
- Authors
- Jun, S., & Mulder, B.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2006-08-15
- Volume
- 103
- Issue
- 33
- Pages
- 12388-12393
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2022408178
- Cited by
- 410
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Entropy-driven spatial organization of highly confined polymers: Lessons for the bacterial chromosome. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.0605305103
- The paper
- Jun, S., & Mulder, B. (2006). Entropy-driven spatial organization of highly confined polymers: Lessons for the bacterial chromosome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0605305103
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
