The model of DNA chain motion in pulsed field gel electrophoresis (Q2714033)

The movement of a doublestrained charged DNA chain is considered in an external electric field. The chain motion is determined by the external field and the thermal Brownian motion. The gel surrounding the polymer chain of the DNA molecule creates obstacles to its motion. According to de Gennes such a motion occurs by reptation and is interpreted as conformation fluctuations of the polymer chain on the scale inferior to the gel pore size.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe authors expose a mathematical model describing with high accuracy the key experimental results on the nonstationary electrophoresis of the long DNA chains including nonresonance and band inversions. They show that the head segment of the chain has, in average, a constant mobility in an external electric field. For an inextensible chain the values of the so-called end-to-end vector may be calculated as the response of a certain filter. The renewal time is a constant in the electric field under consideration. Comparison with an experiment shows that the model makes it possible to obtain both qualitative and quantitative description of the DNA chain anomalous mobility in electrophoresis using pulsed electric fields.