A Monte Carlo Study of Knots in Long Double-Stranded DNA Chains
Fig 3
Probabilities of dominant knot types in dsDNA as a function of DNA length (in base pairs) for physiological salt concentrations (0.15M NaCl).
The knot spectrum is dominated by composite knots which have trefoil knots as prime factors. The likelihood of observing a prime knot other than the trefoil 31 or figure-eight knot 41 is very small for DNA chains of up to ≈525,000bp (N = 40,000 beads), see S1 Fig. Data points are documented in S2 Table.