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BookmarkScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2007) — DNA, the biomolecule that provides the blueprint for life, has a lesser-known identity as a stretchy polymer. The authors have found a flaw in the most common model for DNA elasticity, a discovery that will improve the accuracy of single-molecule research and perhaps pave the way for DNA to become an official standard for measuring picoscale forces, a notoriously difficult challenge.
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The experiments described in this paper* reveal that a classic model for measuring the elasticity of double-stranded DNA leads to errors when the molecules are short. For instance, measurements are off by up to 18 percent for molecules 632 nanometers long, and by 10 percent for molecules about twice that length. (By contrast, the DNA in a single human cell, if linked together and stretched out, would be about 2 meters long.)
The old elasticity model assumes that polymers are infinitely long, whereas the most popular length for high precision single-molecule studies is 600 nm to 2 microns, coauthor Tom Perkins says. Accordingly, several university collaborators developed a new theory, the finite worm-like chain (FWLC) model, which improves accuracy by incorporating three previously neglected effects, including length.
The work described in this article is part of a NIST project studying the possible use of DNA as a picoforce standard, because enzymes build DNA with atomic precision. DNA already is used informally to calibrate atomic force microscopes. An official standard could, for the first time, enable picoscale measurements that are traceable to internationally accepted units. DNA elasticity could provide a force standard from 0.1 -10 pico-Newtons (pN), where 1 pN is the approximate weight of an E. coli cell or the force exerted by 1 milliwatt of light reflected off a mirror.
*This research is published in the December 15, 2007 issue of Biophysical Journal (Volume 93, Issue 12).
The work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, the Butcher Foundation, a W.M. Keck Grant in the RNA Sciences, NIST, and the National Science Foundation.
