par Di Michele, Lorenzo;Mognetti, Bortolo Matteo ;Yanagishima, Taiki;Varilly, Patrick;Ruff, Zachary;Frenkel, Daan;Eiser, Erika
Référence Journal of the American Chemical Society, 136, 18, page (6538-6541), http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja500027v
Publication Publié, 2014
Article révisé par les pairs
Résumé : The selective hybridization of DNA is of key importance for many practical applications such as gene detection and DNA-mediated self-assembly. These applications require a quantitative prediction of the hybridization free energy. Existing methods ignore the effects of non-complementary ssDNA tails beyond the first unpaired base. We use experiments and simulations to show that the binding strength of complementary ssDNA oligomers is altered by these sequences of non-complementary nucleotides. Even a small number of non-binding bases are enough to raise the hybridization free energy by approximately 1 kcal/mol at physiological salt concentrations. We propose a simple analytical expression that accounts quantitatively for this variation as a function of tail length and salt concentration. © 2014 American Chemical Society.