DNA denaturation and wetting in the presence of disorder

TL;DR

This paper establishes an exact equivalence between DNA denaturation models and wetting models, using random matrix representations to analyze the effects of disorder on critical behavior, especially in the weak disorder limit.

Contribution

It introduces a novel equivalence between DNA denaturation and wetting models and applies random matrix techniques to study disorder effects on phase transitions.

Findings

Disorder alters the critical behavior of DNA denaturation.

Mean-field approximation captures the impact of weak disorder.

The equivalence simplifies analysis of complex biological models.

Abstract

We present a precise equivalence of the Lifson-Poland-Scheraga model with wetting models. Making use of a representation of the former model in terms of random matrices, we obtain, in the limit of weak disorder, a mean--field approximation, that shows a change of the critical behavior due to disorder.