Tonau Nakai

Removal of histone tails from nucleosome dissects the physical mechanisms of salt-induced aggregation, linker histone H1-induced compaction, and 30-nm fiber formation of the nucleosome array (2009)

Hizume, Kohji, Nakai, Tonau, Araki, Sumiko, Prieto, Eloise, Yoshikawa, Kenichi, Takeyasu, Kunio

In order to reveal the roles of histone tails in the formation of higher-order chromatin structures, we employed atomic force microscopy (AFM), and an in vitro reconstitution system to examine the...

Hydrodynamic radius of circular DNA is larger than that of linear DNA (2006)

Araki, Sumiko, Nakai, Tonau, Hizume, Kohji, Takeyasu, Kunio, Yoshikawa, Kenichi

It is generally accepted that linear polymers are larger, such as with regard to the end-to-end distance and gyration radius, than the corresponding circular polymers. We measured the Brownian motion...

All-or-none switching of transcriptional activity on single DNA molecules caused by a discrete conformational transition (2004)

Yamada, Ayako, Kubo, Koji, Nakai, Tonau, Tsumoto, Kanta, Yoshikawa, Kenichi

Recently, it has been confirmed that long duplex DNA molecules with sizes larger than several tens of kilo-base pairs (kbp), exhibit a discrete conformational transition from an elongated coil state...

Phase Transition in Reconstituted Chromatin (2004)

Nakai, Tonau, Hizume, Kohji, Yoshimura, Shige. H., Takeyasu, Kunio, Yoshikawa, Kenichi

By observing reconstituted chromatin by fluorescence microscopy (FM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), we found that the density of nucleosomes exhibits a bimodal profile, i.e., there is a large...