Thermodynamics of Denaturation Transition of DNA Duplex Oligomers in the Context of Nearest Neighbor Models: A Short Review

In this article, it is shown how additive physical properties of DNA double strand polymers can be expanded in terms of 8 irreducible parameters. This provides self-consistency relations among the corresponding 10 duplex dimer contributions. To allow for oligomer analysis, initiation parameters must be added, and, this adds extra degrees of freedom to the fore mentioned parameters. This modelling permits that nucleation free energies could be calculated as a function of the mean global composition of the chain.