Statistical mechanical simulation of polymeric DNA melting with MELTSIM

Abstract

Motivation: MELTSIM is a windows-based statistical mechanical program for simulating melting curves of DNAs of known sequence and genomic dimensions under different conditions of ionic strength with great accuracy. The program is useful for mapping variations of base compositions of sequences, conducting studies of denaturation, establishing appropriate conditions for hybridization and renaturation, determinations of sequence complexity, and sequence divergence. Results: Good agreement is achieved between experimental and calculated melting curves of plasmid, bacterial, yeast and human DNAs. Denaturation maps that accompany the calculated curves indicate non-coding regions have a significantly lower (G+C) composition than coding regions in all species examined. Curves of partially sequenced human DNA suggest the current database may be heavily biased with coding regions, and excluding large (A+T)-rich elements. Availability: MELTSIM 1.0 is available at: //www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/UMLBIC/Apps/MELTSIM/MELTSIM-1.0-Win/meltsim.zip. Melting curve plots in this paper were made with GNUPLOT 3.5.