The large-scale structure and dynamics of genomes and randomly branching double-folded ring polymers

Random tree-like structures are ubiquitous in Nature and have been intensely studied in analytical as well as computational works. The most obvious example from soft matter are randomly branching polymers, but annealed tree-like structures also emerge in dense solutions of non-concatenated and unknotted circular (ring) polymers. In the biological context, they represent generic models for describing the large-scale conformational properties of bacterial DNA, chromosomal DNA during interphase and viral RNA. In the seminar, I will spend quite some time in the beginning to motivate the connection between genome folding and randomly branching polymers before presenting graph-theoretical and simulation results on static and dynamic properties on randomly branching double-folded ring polymers.