DNA as a one-dimensional chiral material: application to the structural transition between B form and Z form

A dynamical model is presented for chiral change in DNA molecules. The model is an extension of the conventional elastic model, which incorporates the structure of base pairs and uses a spinor representation for the DNA configuration together with a gauge principle. Motivated by a recent experiment reporting chiral transitions between right-handed B-DNA and left-handed Z-DNA [Lee et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 107, 4985 (2010)], we analyze the free energy for the particular case of linear DNA with an externally applied torque. The model shows that there exists, at low temperature, a rapid structural change depending on the torque exerted on the DNA, which causes switching in B and Z domain sizes. This can explain the frequent switches of DNA extension observed in experiments.