Denaturation of Heterogeneous DNA

1997/01/31 by D. Cule, Dinko Cule, Terence Hwa +1 · 9 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #DNA and Nucleic Acid Chemistry #Nanopore and Nanochannel Transport Studies #Protein Structure and Dynamics #cond-mat.stat-mech #q-bio

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.79.2375

4 pages, LaTeX, text and figures also available at http://matisse.ucsd.edu/~hwa

arxiv created 1997/07/09 · openalex publication_date 1997/09/22 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The effect of heterogeneous sequence composition on the denaturation of double-stranded DNA is investigated. The resulting pair-binding energy variation is found to have a negligible effect on the critical properties of the smooth second-order melting transition in the simplest (Peyrard-Bishop) model. However, sequence heterogeneity is dramatically amplified upon adopting a more realistic treatment of the backbone stiffness. The model yields features of ``multistep melting'' similar to those observed in experiments.

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