Figure 3.

Physiological self-crowding strongly increases the asphericity of non-supercoiled DNA but affects less the asphericity of supercoiled DNA molecules. Individual density profiles of asphericity values were obtained after analysis of more than 12 000 momentary configurations representing three types of simulated DNA molecules: non-supercoiled (a), supercoiled with σ ≈ −0.025 (b) and σ ≈ −0.05 (c) at four different DNA concentrations: diluted, 5, 10 and 20%. Insets show simulated configurations at diluted state (left) and at physiological DNA concentration of 20% (right). The shown configurations have their asphericity values very close to the average values observed in simulations of the corresponding system.