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Excluded volume effects in gene stretching
Author(s) -
Lam PuiMan
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
biopolymers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.556
H-Index - 125
eISSN - 1097-0282
pISSN - 0006-3525
DOI - 10.1002/bip.10122
Subject(s) - excluded volume , lambda , exponent , volume (thermodynamics) , chemistry , extension (predicate logic) , range (aeronautics) , chain (unit) , dna , statistical physics , thermodynamics , crystallography , combinatorics , physics , optics , mathematics , quantum mechanics , materials science , polymer , philosophy , biochemistry , organic chemistry , computer science , composite material , programming language , linguistics
We investigate the effects excluded volume on the stretching of a single DNA in solution. We find that for small force F , the extension h is not linear in F but proportion to F γ , with γ = (1 − ν)/ν, where ν is the well‐known universal correlation length exponent. A freely joint chain model with the segment length chosen to reproduce the small extension behavior gives excellent fit to the experimental data of λ‐phage DNA over the whole experimental range. We show that excluded volume effects are stronger in two dimensions and derive results in two dimensions that are different from the three‐dimensional results. This suggests experiments to be performed in these lower dimensions. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Biopolymers 64: 57–62, 2002