TY - JOUR
T1 - Unveiled electric profiles within hydrogen bonds suggest DNA base pairs with similar bond strengths
AU - Ruiz-Blanco, Y. B.
AU - Almeida, Y.
AU - Sotomayor-Torres, C. M.
AU - García, Y.
PY - 2017/10/1
Y1 - 2017/10/1
N2 - © 2017 Ruiz-Blanco et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Electrical forces are the background of all the interactions occurring in biochemical systems. From here and by using a combination of ab-initio and ad-hoc models, we introduce the first description of electric field profiles with intrabond resolution to support a characterization of single bond forces attending to its electrical origin. This fundamental issue has eluded a physical description so far. Our method is applied to describe hydrogen bonds (HB) in DNA base pairs. Numerical results reveal that base pairs in DNA could be equivalent considering HB strength contributions, which challenges previous interpretations of thermodynamic properties of DNA based on the assumption that Adenine/Thymine pairs are weaker than Guanine/Cytosine pairs due to the sole difference in the number of HB. Thus, our methodology provides solid foundations to support the development of extended models intended to go deeper into the molecular mechanisms of DNA functioning.
AB - © 2017 Ruiz-Blanco et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Electrical forces are the background of all the interactions occurring in biochemical systems. From here and by using a combination of ab-initio and ad-hoc models, we introduce the first description of electric field profiles with intrabond resolution to support a characterization of single bond forces attending to its electrical origin. This fundamental issue has eluded a physical description so far. Our method is applied to describe hydrogen bonds (HB) in DNA base pairs. Numerical results reveal that base pairs in DNA could be equivalent considering HB strength contributions, which challenges previous interpretations of thermodynamic properties of DNA based on the assumption that Adenine/Thymine pairs are weaker than Guanine/Cytosine pairs due to the sole difference in the number of HB. Thus, our methodology provides solid foundations to support the development of extended models intended to go deeper into the molecular mechanisms of DNA functioning.
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0185638
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0185638
M3 - Article
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 12
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 10
M1 - e0185638
ER -