Effects of monovalent and divalent cations on the rheology of entangled DNA

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the effects of varying cation valency and concentration on the rheology of entangled λDNA solutions. We show that monovalent cations moderately increase the viscoelasticty of the solutions mainly by stabilising linear concatenation of λDNA “monomers” via hybridisation of their sticky ends. On the contrary, divalent cations have a far more complex and dramatic effect on the rheology of the solution and we observe evidence of inter-molecular DNA–DNA bridging by Mg²⁺. We argue that these results may be interesting in the context of dense solutions of single and double stranded DNA, e.g. in vivo or in biotechnology applications such as DNA origami and DNA hydrogels.