Detection of Hofmeister effects at a single-molecule level

Guangzhou Qu; Ting Liang; Yuyu Feng; Jiaen Li; Zhouhui Deng; Hu Chen; Yanhui Liu

doi:10.1209/0295-5075/ad121b

All issues

Volume 144 / No 5 (December 2023)

EPL, 144 5 (2023) 57001

Abstract

Issue		EPL Volume 144, Number 5, December 2023


Article Number		57001
Number of page(s)		6
Section		Biological and soft matter physics
DOI		https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/ad121b
Published online		20 December 2023

EPL, 144 (2023) 57001

Detection of Hofmeister effects at a single-molecule level

Guangzhou Qu¹, Ting Liang¹, Yuyu Feng¹, Jiaen Li³, Zhouhui Deng⁴, Hu Chen² (chenhu@xmu.edu.cn) and Yanhui Liu¹ (yhliu1@gzu.edu.cn)

¹ College of Physics, Guizhou University - Guiyang 550025, China
² Research Institute for Biomimetics and Soft Matter, Fujian Provincial Key Lab for Soft Functional Materials Research, Department of Physics, Xiamen University - Xiamen 361005, China
³ Guizhou Qiannan Economics College - Guiyang 550025, China
⁴ Kechuang Industrial Development Company Limited - Guian New Area, Guiyang 550025, China

Received: 10 October 2023
Accepted: 4 December 2023

Abstract

Metal cations are essential for the function of nucleic acids. Given their efficiency for DNA overwinding and the DNA hairpin folding/unfolding process coupled with DNA twist, we systematically investigated the effects of cation identities and increasing concentrations of NaCl, KCl, and LiCl from 50 mM to 300 mM on the folding/unfolding process by manipulating a DNA hairpin construct with magnetic tweezers. The critical forces and free energy of the unfolding transition of the DNA hairpin at a fixed concentration of KCl, NaCl, and LiCl followed the same ranking as $\text{K}^{+}<{}\text{Na}^{+}<{}\text{Li}^{+}$ , and are reversed with the unfolding rate ranking of $\text{K}^{+}>{}\text{Na}^{+}>{}\text{Li}^{+}$ . This highlights that the addition of Li⁺ in solution obviously enhances the stability of the DNA hairpin when compared to Na⁺, and K⁺, and their efficiency on the stability of the DNA hairpin was ranked as $\text{K}^{+}<{}\text{Na}^{+}<{}\text{Li}^{+}$ .

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