Open AccessUnderstanding the origin of liquid crystal ordering of ultrashort double-stranded DNA
Author(s) -
Suman Saurabh,
Yves Lansac,
Yun Hee Jang,
Matthew A. Glaser,
Noel A. Clark,
Prabal K. Maiti
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
physical review. e
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.896
H-Index - 304
eISSN - 2470-0053
pISSN - 2470-0045
DOI - 10.1103/physreve.95.032702
Subject(s) - stacking , liquid crystal , anisotropy , supramolecular chemistry , materials science , chemical physics , molecular dynamics , base pair , crystallography , dna , molecular physics , condensed matter physics , crystal structure , physics , optics , chemistry , computational chemistry , nuclear magnetic resonance , biochemistry , optoelectronics
Recent experiments have shown that short double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) fragments having six- to 20-base pairs exhibit various liquid crystalline phases. This violates the condition of minimum molecular shape anisotropy that analytical theories demand for liquid crystalline ordering. It has been hypothesized that the liquid crystalline ordering is the result of end-to-end stacking of dsDNA to form long supramolecular columns which satisfy the shape anisotropy criterion necessary for ordering. To probe the thermodynamic feasibility of this process, we perform molecular dynamics simulations on ultrashort (four base pair long) dsDNA fragments, quantify the strong end-to-end attraction between them, and demonstrate that the nematic ordering of the self-assembled stacked columns is retained for a large range of temperature and salt concentration