Entropic Elasticity, Cooperative Extensibility and Supercoiling Property of DNA: A Unified Viewpoint
Abstract
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.
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