Nucleation at the DNA supercoiling transition

Abstract

Twisting DNA under a constant applied force reveals a thermally activated transition into a state with a supercoiled structure known as a plectoneme. Using transition state theory, we predict the rate of this plectoneme nucleation to be of order 10^4 Hz. We reconcile this with experiments that have measured hopping rates of order 10 Hz by noting that the viscosity of the bead used to manipulate the DNA limits the measured rate. We find that the intrinsic bending caused by disorder in the base-pair sequence is important for understanding the free energy barrier that governs the transition. Both analytic and numerical methods are used in the calculations. We provide extensive details on the numerical methods for simulating the elastic rod model with and without disorder.