Defects excited in sharply bent DNA molecules
and temperature dependent linking number distribution of
DNA minicircles
Jie Yan
National University of Singapore
Kinkable defect excitation in sharply bent DNA molecules have drawn attention in recent years. Such excitations were recently observed in molecular dynamics simulations, and were directly observed in experiments in circular DNAs of 64 - 65 base pairs. In this presentation, we show that excitation of soft defects can explain a few recent experiments where unusual DNA mechanical responses were observed. The molecular details of possible defects will be discussed based on our molecular dynamics simulations. Finally, we show that the defect excitation mechanism leads to a prediction of a temperature dependent linking number distribution of short circular DNAs that can be investigated in experiments.