2017_PRX_RiMS.pdf (1.03 MB)
Rotation-induced macromolecular spooling of DNA
journal contribution
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. LeslieGenetic 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 XVolume
7Issue
3Citation
SHENDRUK, T.N. ... et al., 2017. Rotation-induced macromolecular spooling of DNA. Physical Review X, 7: 031005.Publisher
American Physical SocietyVersion
- 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
2017-07-01Publication date
2017-07-11Notes
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
2160-3308Publisher version
Language
- en