Electrostatic effects in DNA stretching

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates electrostatic effects on DNA stretching, demonstrating the applicability of effective charge concepts and revealing nonlinear regime deviations from classical models, aligning well with recent experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a nonlinear Poisson-Boltzmann framework to analyze DNA electrostatics and extends the understanding of persistence length and stretching behavior beyond linear approximations.

Findings

Effective charge can be derived from electrostatic potential asymptotics.

The classical OSF formula applies in the linearized regime with charge renormalization.

Nonlinear effects cause deviations in short-length behavior and predict a two-stage elastic response.

Abstract

The response of a semiflexible polyelectrolyte chain to stretching in the regimes of moderate and weak screening is studied theoretically, with a special focus on DNA experiments. By using the nonlinear Poisson--Boltzmann description of electrostatic self--interactions of the chain, we explicitly demonstrate the applicability of the concept of effective charge to certain aspects of the problem. This charge can be extracted from the far--field asymptotic behavior of electrostatic potential of the fully aligned chain. Surprisingly, in terms of the effective charge, the electrostatically renormalized persistence length can be formally described by the classical Odijk-Skolnick-Fixman (OSF) formula, whose domain of applicability is limited to linearized Debye Huckel (DH) approximation. However, the short--length behavior of the chain in the nonlinear regime deviates from the of DH--based result, even upon the charge renormalization. This difference is revealed in calculated stretching curves of strongly charged DNA, and our results are in good agreement with the recent experiments. In the limit of weak screening we predict the elastic response to have a distinctive two-stage character, with a peculiar intermediate "unstretchable" regime.