ABSTRACT
The most fundamental feature of DNA is its ability to hybridize its two complementary strands. This is the prime example of the physico-chemical recognition processes which are at the heart of essentially all biological mechanisms on a molecular level. The hybridization of oligomeric DNA on microarrays in order to measure gene expression levels has been a huge topic in the early days of genomics; meanwhile new techniques have largely bypassed this approach. The recognition capability of a single-stranded RNA or DNA towards its complementary sequence can be exploited in a very simple way to measure the presence and amount of DNA in a given sample. There are several other models that have been developed for the description of DNA denaturation aside from the Poland-Scheraga model. The DNA melting transition in the Poland-Scheraga model shows some peculiarities when compared to the standard classification of phase transitions.
