Abstract
The fundamental stimulus for the development of the theory to be presented in this paper was the discovery of circular DNAs. We recall that DNA molecules, which contain all the information on the structure of living organisms, consist of two polymer chains attached to one another by weak, noncovalent interactions. These chains form a double helix in which γo = 10 monomer links (base pairs) occur per turn. Actual DNAs contain from several thousand to billions of monomer links. Initially the main attention was focused on studying the properties of linear DNA molecules, since this is precisely the form of DNA that could be extracted from cells and virus particles.
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Frank-Kamenetskii, M. (1991). DNA Topology. In: Peliti, L. (eds) Biologically Inspired Physics. NATO ASI Series, vol 263. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9483-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9483-0_4
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