A Monte Carlo Study of Knots in Long Double-Stranded DNA Chains
Fig 4
Probability distributions of the trefoil contour length for various DNA sizes.
Displayed values are (conditional) probabilities of trefoil sizes of up to 13,000bp (N = 1000), given that a chain contains a trefoil knot in the first place. Therefore, the area below each individual curve equals one (if each curve is integrated over its entire domain). Irrespective of the actual DNA length, the most likely trefoil size is close to ≈3,000bp (N≈230). After reaching its maximum, each distribution decreases until the trefoil size is equal to the total DNA length. The original data has been smoothed by a (two-sided) running average. For comparison, the original data is shown for a total DNA length of ≈66,000bp (N = 5000). Inset: Distribution of trefoil diameters for a DNA strand of ≈13,000bp (N = 1000). The most likely diameter is ≈200nm.