title: Y-DNA melting: a short tale of three scales.
abstract: We address some aspects of the thermal denaturation of Y-DNA-the three-way junction-on three different length scales: the effect of chain concentration on the extrinsic melting behaviour within a simple kinetic approach, the exponent of the loop entropy in intrinsic melting as it appears in statistical mechanics models, and the microscopics of stacking within the junction from molecular dynamics simulations. Our results suggest that a multiscale approach is needed to properly describe the denaturation properties of these systems. We propose experiments which can also shed light on the melting of short and long duplex DNA sequences.
authors.affiliation: Biological Nanosystems, Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Lille University of Science and Technology, USR CNRS 3078, c/o IBL, Rue du Prof Calmette 1, 59021 Lille Cedex, France. Laboratoire dAnalyse et dArchitecture des Systmes-CNRS, 7 Av du Colonel Roche 31077 Toulouse Cedex 04, France.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dkhissi
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Renvez
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Blossey