Role of dissolved salts in thermophoresis of DNA: Lattice-Boltzmann-based simulations

Abstract

We use a lattice Boltzmann based Brownian dynamics simulation to investigate the dependence of DNA thermophoresis on its interaction with dissolved salts. We find the thermal diffusion coefficient D{T} depends on the molecule size, in contrast with previous simulations without electrostatics. The measured S{T} also depends on the Debye length. This suggests thermophoresis of DNA is influenced by the electrostatic interactions between the polymer beads and the salt ions. However, when electrostatic forces are weak, DNA thermophoresis is not found, suggesting that other repulsive forces such as the excluded volume force prevent thermal migration.

Thermophoresis of charged colloidal particles in aqueous media – Effect of particle size

“…Many questions still remain, one of which is the dependence of thermophoresis on particle size. Practically, the characteristic of size dependent thermophoresis has a potential application for the separation of particles of different sizes [9][10][11], the manipulation of DNAs [12][13][14], and the enhancement of heat transfer of nanofluids [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. In the literature, although numerous theoretical and experimental studies have been reported on the size dependence of thermophoresis for dilute polystyrene (PS) beads dispersed in aqueous solutions, the results of these investigations are inconsistent and inconclusive.…”

Water aluminum oxide nanofluid benchmark model

“…Due to all of these reasons, the simulation of natural convection and thermofluidic flow in cavity requires less computational cost. This promotes the application of this method for engineering problems such as energy, double diffusive convection, heating and cooling of a unit [10,11,30,31,34].…”

“…Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is an effective numerical method for a wide range of complex fluid flow phenomena that are problematic for conventional methods [10,11,30,31]. LBM can be differentiated from other numerical methods due to the following reasons.…”

A programming triangular DNA origami for doxorubicin loading and delivering to target ovarian cancer cells

“…However, until 2010, most applications of DNA origamis are remain in a concept or testing phase [14]. Researchers focus on the design of DNA origami with different shape or functions, such as DNA origami tubes [15][16], square lattice [17][18][19][20], rectangular [21][22], triangular [17,[23][24][25][26][27][28]] and so on.…”