Knotted folds induced by homochiral all-parallel (or all-antiparallel) double-helices
Many biomolecules and their synthetic counterparts preferentially assemble into double-helices with a preferred handedness and parallelism, such as all-antiparallel, right-handed double-helical polymorphs of DNA and RNA favored under ambient conditions by Watson-Crick duplexing. We analyze knots formed by double-helices which are exclusively all-parallel (or exclusively all-antiparallel) and all right-handed (or all left-handed) . Most simpler knot enantiomers are unrealizable. Among the nearly 500 distinct knot enantiomers with up to 10 crossings, fewer than 10% can be formed by such double-helices. Simplest designs for the folding of admissible knot enantiomers via duplexing of complementary base pairs in single-stranded RNA (or DNA) are enumerated for those knots.
Authors
- Stephen T. Hyde (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2003-9992)
- Myfanwy E. Evans (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0161-6523)
- N Taylor (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2290-9322)
- Callum A R Metzke
Institutions
- Australian National University (AU)
- The University of Sydney (AU)
- University of Potsdam (DE)
- UNSW Sydney (AU)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Cooperative Trials Group for Neuro-Oncology (AU)
Publication Details
- Journal
- PNAS Nexus
- Published
- 2026-08-25
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag278
- Primary Topic
- Supramolecular Chemistry and Complexes
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00