Electrostatic effects in DNA stretching

Abstract

The response of a semiflexible polyelectrolyte chain to stretching in the regimes of moderate and weak screening is studied theoretically, with a special focus on DNA experiments. By using the nonlinear Poisson-Boltzmann description of electrostatic self-interactions of the chain, we explicitly demonstrate the applicability of the concept of effective charge to certain aspects of the problem. This charge can be extracted from the far-field asymptotic behavior of the electrostatic potential of the fully aligned chain. Surprisingly, in terms of the effective charge, the electrostatically renormalized persistence length can be formally described by the classical Odijk-Skolnick-Fixman formula, whose domain of applicability is normally limited to the linearized Debye-Hückel (DH) approximation. However, the short-scale behavior of the chain in the nonlinear regime deviates from the of DH-based result, even upon charge renormalization. This difference is revealed in the calculated stretching curves for strongly charged DNA. These results are in good agreement with recent experiments. In the limit of weak screening we predict the elastic response to have a distinctive two-stage character, with a peculiar intermediate "unstretchable" regime.