ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America1997
Ionic effects on the elasticity of single DNA molecules.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1997. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 330 papers.
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Who cites it
330 citing papers in PubMed, 1,004 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Ion-Specific Modulation of the Conformation and Compactness of DNA Oligo-Catenanes.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2026Article
- Molecular interplay between the DNA damage checkpoint kinase Mec1-Ddc2 and its activator Dpb11 on gapped DNA.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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- Unleashing high trans-substrate cleavage kinetics of Cas12a for nucleic acid diagnostics.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Compromised two-start zigzag chromatin folding in immature mouse retina cells driven by irregularly spaced nucleosomes with short DNA linkers.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
270 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We used a force-measuring laser tweezers apparatus to determine the elastic properties of lambda-bacteriophage DNA as a function of ionic strength and in the presence of multivalent cations. The electrostatic contribution to the persistence length P varied as the inverse of the ionic strength in monovalent salt, as predicted by the standard worm-like polyelectrolyte model. However, ionic strength is not always the dominant variable in determining the elastic properties of DNA. Monovalent and multivalent ions have quite different effects even when present at the same ionic strength. Multivalent ions lead to P values as low as 250-300 A, well below the high-salt "fully neutralized" value of 450-500 A characteristic of DNA in monovalent salt. The ions Mg2+ and Co(NH3)63+, in which the charge is centrally concentrated, yield lower P values than the polyamines putrescine2+ and spermidine3+, in which the charge is linearly distributed. The elastic stretch modulus, S, and P display opposite trends with ionic strength, in contradiction to predictions of macroscopic elasticity theory. DNA is well described as a worm-like chain at concentrations of trivalent cations capable of inducing condensation, if condensation is prevented by keeping the molecule stretched. A retractile force appears in the presence of multivalent cations at molecular extensions that allow intramolecular contacts, suggesting condensation in stretched DNA occurs by a "thermal ratchet" mechanism.
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