95 Orientational ordering of short DNA fragments in the polymer matrix

Abstract

As a vital part of modern nanotechnology, nanofabrication aims to develop nanoscale components and nanomaterials in large quantities at relatively low cost. The promising strategy is the bottom-up self-assembly techniques of chemical assembly and molecular recognition to bring together individual atoms, molecules, or supramolecular building blocks to form useful constructs. The DNA-DNA self-assembly seems to be the key point regulating the polymer composites formation. We address the mixture of a flexible polymer with short double-strand DNA fragments, where the persistence length is in comparable with the contour length of the molecule. We investigate the conditions affecting the orientational order formation of short double-strand DNA fragments, immersed in the flexible polymer. It is shown that short double-strand DNA fragments exhibit the formation of a liquid crystalline ordered phase, in dependence on the value of the Flory–Huggins parameter, aspect ratio , and the attraction energy (Mamasakhlisov et al., 2009; Todd et al., 2008) of the double strand DNA molecules and volume fraction of polymer.