Direct observation of large temperature fluctuations during DNA thermal denaturation

Abstract

In this paper we report direct measurement of large low frequency temperature fluctuations in double stranded (ds) DNA when it undergoes thermal denaturation transition. The fluctuation, which occurs only in the temperature range where the denaturation occurs, is several orders more than the expected equilibrium fluctuation. It is absent in single stranded (ss) DNA of the same sequence. The fluctuation at a given temperature also depends on the wait time and vanishes in a scale of few hours. It is suggested that the large fluctuation occurs due to coexisting denaturated and closed base pairs that are in dynamic equilibrium due to transition through a potential barrier in the scale of 25-30k_{B}T_{0}(T_{0}=300K).

4 pages, 5 figures, Replaced with revised version

References in corpus (6)

• DNA unzipped under a constant force exhibits multiple metastable intermediates
• Thermal denaturation of an helicoidal DNA model
• Reparametrizing loop entropy weights: Effect on DNA melting curves
• Slow nucleic acid unzipping kinetics from sequence-defined barriers
• Poland-Scheraga models and the DNA denaturation transition
• A simple model for DNA denaturation

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Kinetic Spinodal Instabilities in the Mott Transition in V2O3: Evidence from Hysteresis Scaling and Dissipative Phase Ordering
• 1/f fluctuations of DNA temperature at thermal denaturation
• 1/f Noise from the Laws of Thermodynamics for Finite-Size Fluctuations
• Fluctuation theorems and 1/f noise from a simple matrix
• Absolute calibration of the latent heat of transition using differential thermal analysis