title: Solitonlike base pair opening in a helicoidal DNA: an analogy with a helimagnet and a cholesteric liquid crystal.
abstract: We propose a model for DNA dynamics by introducing the helical structure through twist deformation in analogy with the structure of a helimagnet and a cholesteric liquid-crystal system. The dynamics in this case is found to be governed by the completely integrable sine Gordon equation, which admits kink-antikink solitons with increased width, representing a wide base-pair opening configuration in DNA. The results show that the helicity introduces a length-scale variation and thus provides a better representation of the base-pair opening in DNA.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, School of Physics, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli 620 024, India. danielcnld@gmail.com
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Daniel
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Vasumathi
mesh_terms: D020029:Base Pairing; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D050866:Liquid Crystals / Q000737:chemistry*; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular
chemical_list: D004247:DNA