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Rotation-induced macromolecular spooling of DNA

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posted on 2018-12-10, 11:31 authored by Tyler Shendruk, David Sean, Daniel J. Berard, Julian Wolf, Justin Dragoman, Sophie Battat, Gary W. Slater, Sabrina R. Leslie
Genetic information is stored in a linear sequence of base pairs; however, thermal fluctuations and complex DNA conformations such as folds and loops make it challenging to order genomic material for in vitro analysis. In this work, we discover that rotation-induced macromolecular spooling of DNA around a rotating microwire can monotonically order genomic bases, overcoming this challenge. We use singlemolecule fluorescence microscopy to directly visualize long DNA strands deforming and elongating in shear flow near a rotating microwire, in agreement with numerical simulations. While untethered DNA is observed to elongate substantially, in agreement with our theory and numerical simulations, strong extension of DNA becomes possible by introducing tethering. For the case of tethered polymers, we show that increasing the rotation rate can deterministically spool a substantial portion of the chain into a fully stretched, single-file conformation. When applied to DNA, the fraction of genetic information sequentially ordered on the microwire surface will increase with the contour length, despite the increased entropy. This ability to handle long strands of DNA is in contrast to modern DNA sample preparation technologies for sequencing and mapping, which are typically restricted to comparatively short strands, resulting in challenges in reconstructing the genome. Thus, in addition to discovering new rotation-induced macromolecular dynamics, this work inspires new approaches to handling genomic-length DNA strands

Funding

This work was primarily supported by funding from the NSERC Discovery Program, McGill University, and the University of Ottawa. T. N. S. would like to acknowledge funding from EMBO (ALTF181-2013) and an ERC Advanced Grant No. MiCE (291234)

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematical Sciences

Published in

Physical Review X

Volume

7

Issue

3

Citation

SHENDRUK, T.N. ... et al., 2017. Rotation-induced macromolecular spooling of DNA. Physical Review X, 7: 031005.

Publisher

American Physical Society

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-07-01

Publication date

2017-07-11

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by American Physical Society under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

eISSN

2160-3308

Language

  • en

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