A fit-less approach to the elasticity of the handles in optical tweezers experiments

Abstract

The elastic properties of the double-stranded DNA handles used in optical tweezers experiments on biomolecules are customarily modeled by an extensible worm-like chain model. Fitting such model to experimental data however is no trivial task, as the function depends on four parameters in a highly non-linear fashion. We hereby propose a method to bypass the fitting procedure and obtain an empirical force vs. extension curve that accurately reproduce the elasticity of the handles.

5 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Effects of ligand binding on the energy landscape of acyl-CoA-binding protein
• Efficient methods for determining folding free energies in single-molecule pulling experiments