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. 2017 Jun 22;45(13):7541–7554. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkx541

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© The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

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Figure 4. — Distribution of plectoneme and branch lengths. (A) Distribution of plectoneme lengths. Model plectoneme lengths (red triangles) fall between experimental fits to exponential distributions with mean lengths of 9 kb (based on transcriptional activity of supercoiling-sensitive genes; in green) and 11 kb (based on analysis of EM images; in blue) (figure adapted from (31)). (B) Branch count (red) as a function of plectoneme length compared to predictions based on plasmid branching (blue). Mean experimental branch counts for plasmids of lengths 3.5 and 7 kb (35) are in green. (C) Distribution of fractional branch lengths of simulated 7 kb plectonemes (red) compared with experimental lengths in a negatively-supercoiled 7 kb plasmid ((35); in blue). Further discussion of the alternative global orientations and details of the derivation of branching patterns from experiment appear in Supplementary Data.