How Ring Deletion Impacts the Structure of Interlocked Ring Polymer Sheets

Rings of DNA can be interlocked to create chainmail-like sheets, such as those found in certain organisms called kinetoplasts. Prior studies have explored the topological behavior of these sheets, showing that the type of ring linkage changes the sheet's preferred shape in solution, with some initial work on how their structure changes with solvent conditions. Here, we investigate how the structural features of the sheets, such as average size and curvature, change as a function of ring removal (with rings deleted randomly from an initially complete lattice of interlocked rings). Specifically, using coarse-grained simulations that treat the rings as bead-spring chains, we analyze the structure's radius of gyration and shape in implicit solvent of various effective solvent qualities.