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The circular chromosome of E. coli has been suggested to fold into a collection of sequentially consecutive domains, genes in each of which tend to be co-expressed. It has also been suggested that such domains, forming a partition of the genome, are dynamic with respect to the physiological conditions. However, very little is known about which DNA segments of the E. coli genome form these domains and what determines the boundaries of these domain segments. We present a computational model here to partition the circular genome into consecutive segments, theoretically suggestive of the physically folded supercoiled domains, along with a method for predicting such domains under specified conditions. Our model is based on a hypothesis that the genome of E. coli is partitioned into a set of folding domains so that the total number of unfoldings of these domains in the folded chromosome is minimized, where a domain is unfolded when a biological pathway, consisting of genes encoded in this
