Mapping between the order of thermal denaturation and the shape of the critical line of mechanical unzipping in 1-dimensional DNA models

Abstract

In this Letter, we investigate the link between thermal denaturation and mechanical unzipping for two models of DNA, namely the Dauxois-Peyrard-Bishop model and a variant thereof we proposed recently. We show that the critical line that separates zipped from unzipped DNA sequences in mechanical unzipping experiments is a power-law in the temperature-force plane. We also prove that for the investigated models the corresponding critical exponent is proportional to the critical exponent alpha, which characterizes the behaviour of the specific heat in the neighbourhood of the critical temperature for thermal denaturation.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Thermal and mechanical denaturation properties of a DNA model with three sites per nucleotide
• Thermodynamic relations for DNA phase transitions
• Sharp DNA denaturation in a helicoidal mesoscopic model
• On the Pseudo-Schrödinger Equation approximation of the Transfer-Integral operator for 1-dimensional DNA models