1999/01/31 by Zhou Haijun, Zhang Yang, Ou-Yang Zhong-can
Physics and Astronomy · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.dis-nn #physics.bio-ph #q-bio
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 6560-6563 (1999) APS copyright. · 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
arxiv created 1999/04/04 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
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 ϕ), 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.