Stretching chromatin through confinement
Abstract
We present a method for the stretching of chromatin molecules in nanofluidic channels width a cross-section of about 80 × 80 nm2, and hundreds of microns long. The stretching of chromatin to about 12 basepairs/nm enables location-resolved optical investigation of the nucleic material with a resolution of up to 6 kbp. The stretching is based on the equilibrium elongation that