As a vital part of modern nanotechnology, nanofabrication aims to develop nanoscale components and nanomaterials in large quantities at relatively low cost. The promising strategy is the bottom-up self-assembly techniques of chemical assembly and molecular recognition to bring together individual atoms, molecules, or supramolecular building blocks to form useful constructs. The DNA-DNA self-assembly seems to be the key point regulating the polymer composites formation.

We address the mixture of a flexible polymer with short double-strand DNA fragments, where the persistence length in comparable with the contour length of the molecule. We investigate the conditions affecting the orientational order formation of short double-strand DNA fragments, immersed in the flexible polymer. It is shown that short double-strand DNA fragments exhibit the formation of a liquid crystalline ordered phase, in dependence on the value of the Flory-Huggins parameter, aspect ratio and the attraction energy (Mamasakhlisov et al., 2009; Todd et al., 2008) of the double strand DNA molecules and volume fraction of polymer.

References

Y. Sh. Mamasakhlisov, B. A. Todd, A. V. Badasyan, A. V. Mkrtchyan, V. F. Morozov, & V. A. Parsegian (2009). DNA stretching and multivalent-cation-induced condensation. Phys. Rev. E 80, 1-9.

B.A. Todd, V.A. Parsegian, A. Shirahata, T.J. Thomas, & D.C. Rau (2008). Attractive Forces between Cation Condensed DNA Double Helices. Biophys J. 94 , doi:10.1529/biophysj.107.127332).