micromachines Article
A Horizontal Magnetic Tweezers and Its Use for Studying Single DNA Molecules Roberto Fabian Jr. 1, *, Christopher Tyson 2 , Pamela L. Tuma 3 , Ian Pegg 1 and Abhijit Sarkar 1 1 2 3
*
Department of Physics and Vitreous State Laboratory, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064, USA;
[email protected] (I.P.);
[email protected] (A.S.) Biomedical Engineering Department and Vitreous State Laboratory, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064, USA;
[email protected] Department of Biology, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064, USA;
[email protected] Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +1-202-319-6740
Received: 29 January 2018; Accepted: 12 April 2018; Published: 17 April 2018
Abstract: We report the development of a magnetic tweezers that can be used to micromanipulate single DNA molecules by applying picoNewton (pN)-scale forces in the horizontal plane. The resulting force–extension data from our experiments show high-resolution detection of changes in the DNA tether’s extension: ~0.5 pN in the force and
