Issue 37, 2017

Nanoconfinement greatly speeds up the nucleation and the annealing in single-DNA collapse

Abstract

Manipulating and measuring single-molecule dynamics and reactions in nanofluidics is a rapidly growing field with broad applications in developing new biotechnologies, understanding nanoconfinement effects in vivo, and exploring new phenomena in confinement. In this work, we investigate the kinetics of DNA collapse in nanoslits using single T4-DNA (165.6 kbp) and λ-DNA (48.5 kbp), with particular focus on the measurement of the nucleation and annealing times. Fixing the ethanol concentration at 35% and varying the slit height from 2000 to 31 nm, the nucleation time dramatically decreases from more than 1 hour to a few minutes or less. The increased collapsed rate results from the larger free energy experienced by coiled DNA in confinement relative to compacted DNA. Our results also shed light on other conformational transitions in confinement, such as protein folding.

Graphical abstract: Nanoconfinement greatly speeds up the nucleation and the annealing in single-DNA collapse

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
25 Jan 2017
Accepted
29 Pha 2017
First published
29 Pha 2017

Soft Matter, 2017,13, 6363-6371

Nanoconfinement greatly speeds up the nucleation and the annealing in single-DNA collapse

L. Dai, J. J. Jones, A. R. Klotz, S. Levy and P. S. Doyle, Soft Matter, 2017, 13, 6363 DOI: 10.1039/C7SM01249G

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