DNA denaturation in ionic solution

Abstract

Salt or cations, present in solution play an important role in DNA denaturation and folding kinetics of DNA helix. In this work we study the thermal melting of double stranded DNA (dsDNA) molecule using Peyrard Bishop Dauxois (PBD) model. We modify the potential of H-bonding between the bases of the complimentary strands to introduce the salt and solvent effect. We choose different DNA sequences having different contents of GC pairs and calculate the melting temperatures. The melting temperature increases logarithmically with the salt concentration of the solution. The more GC base pairs in the chain enhance the stability of DNA chain at a fix salt concentration. The obtained results are in good accordance with experimental findings.