A fractal globule also sometimes called a crumpled globule is a name used to describe polymers that have compact local and global scaling.[1] They can be modeled through a Hamiltonian Walk, a lattice walk in which every point is only visited once and no paths intersect, this prevents knot formation. A crumpled globule is a non-equillibrium structure that can be formed through crumpling of a polymer at all length scales, i.e. collapsing in on themselves and this iteratively occurring over the whole polymer.[2] This process follows the Space Filling Peano Curve. It has been proposed that mammalian chromosomes form fractal globules.[3][4]

References

  1. ↑ Dewey, T. Gregory (1998) Fractals in Biophysics. Oxford University Press
  2. ↑ A. Y. Grosberg, S. K. Nechaev, E. I. Shakhnovich, J. Phys. France 49, 2095 (1988)
  3. ↑ Varoquaux, Nelle (2014). "A statistical approach for inferring the 3D structure of the genome". Bioinformatics. 30 (12): i26–i33. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu268. PMC 4229903. PMID 24931992.
  4. ↑ Mirny, Leonid (2011). "The fractal globule as a model of chromatin architecture in the cell" (PDF). Chromosome Research. 19 (1): 37–51. doi:10.1007/s10577-010-9177-0. PMC 3040307. PMID 21274616.


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