Stretching, Twisting and Supercoiling in Short, Single DNA Molecules
Abstract
We had combined the Neukirch-Marko model that describes the extension, torque and supercoiling in single, stretched and twisted DNA of infinite contour length, with a form of the free energy suggested by Sinha and Samuels to describe short DNA, with contour length only a few times the persistence length. We find that the free energy of the stretched but untwisted DNA, is significantly modified from its infinitely length value and this in turn modifies significantly the torque and supercoiling. We show that this is consistent with short DNA being more flexible than infinitely long DNA. We hope our results will stimulate experimental investigation of torque and supercoiling in short DNA.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1711.01942,
title = {Stretching, Twisting and Supercoiling in Short, Single DNA Molecules},
author = {Pui-Man Lam and Yi Zhen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.01942},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
14 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1606.00408; text overlap with arXiv:cond-mat/0412504 by other authors