Modeling the compaction of bacterial chromosomes by biomolecular crowding and the cross-linking protein H-NS

In our studies, both the volume fraction of crowders, \(\phi _c\), and the number of H-NS, \(N_\text{HNS}\), are key parameters. Following the simulation procedure described in Sect. “Computational modeling”, we have first calculated chain size as a function of \(\phi _c\) for various choices of \(N_\text{HNS}\) and plotted the results in Fig. 2. Primarily, we have chosen \(N=200\) and \(N_\text {HNS}=0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 30\), which correspond to H-NS concentrations \([\text {H-NS}] =0, 3.4, 6.8, 10.2, 13.6, 17.0, 25.5 \, \mu \text {M}\), respectively. The entire system is confined…