English

Long DNA molecule as a pseudoscalar liquid crystal

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-05-14 v1

Abstract

We show that a long DNA molecule can form a novel condensed phase of matter, the pseudoscalar liquid crystal, that consists of aperiodically ordered DNA fragments in right-handed B and left-handed Z forms. We discuss the possibility of transformation of B-DNA into Z-DNA and vice versa via first-order phase transitions as well as transformations from the phase with zero total chirality into pure B- or Z-DNA samples through second-order phase transitions. The presented minimalistic phenomenological model describes the pseudoscalar liquid crystal phase of DNA and the phase transition phenomena. We point out to a possibility that a pseudoscalar liquid nano-crystal can be assembled via DNA-programming.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0905.2057,
  title  = {Long DNA molecule as a pseudoscalar liquid crystal},
  author = {K. G. Petrosyan and Chin-Kun Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0905.2057},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:01:41.530Z