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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1978 Aug;75(8):3557–3561. doi: 10.1073/pnas.75.8.3557

Decomposition of the linking number of a closed ribbon: A problem from molecular biology

F Brock Fuller 1
PMCID: PMC392823  PMID: 16592550

Abstract

A closed duplex DNA molecule relaxed and containing nucleosomes has a different linking number from the same molecule relaxed and without nucleosomes. What does this say about the structure of the nucleosome? A mathematical study of this question is made, representing the DNA molecule by a ribbon. It is shown that the linking number of a closed ribbon can be decomposed into the linking number of a reference ribbon plus a sum of locally determined “linking differences.”

Keywords: writhing number, DNA, nucleosome

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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