Entropic Elasticity, Cooperative Extensibility and Supercoiling Property of DNA: A Unified Viewpoint
Abstract
A unified model is constructed to study the recently observed DNA entropic elasticity, cooperative extensibility, and supercoiling property. With the introduction of a new structural parameter (the folding angle $\phi$), bending deformations of sugar-phosphate backbones, steric effects of nucleotide basepairs, and short-range basestacking interactions are considered. The comprehensive agreement of theoretical results with experimental observations on both torsionally relaxed and negatively supercoiled DNAs strongly indicates that, basestacking interactions, although short-ranged in nature, dominate the elasticity of DNA and hence are of vital biological significance.
- Publication:
-
arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- January 1999
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.cond-mat/9901321
- arXiv:
- arXiv:cond-mat/9901321
- Bibcode:
- 1999cond.mat..1321H
- Keywords:
-
- Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter;
- Condensed Matter - Disordered Systems and Neural Networks;
- Physics - Biological Physics;
- Quantitative Biology
- E-Print:
- 4 pages in Latex format, with 3 EPS figures included. A typographic mistake in Eq. (7) is corrected in this version. A slightly different version of this paper will appear in PRL