Before revision: Decoding the energy pathway by which a DNA unravels is the holy grail of biologists and physicists alike. The underlying physics is an intriguing competition of entropy ordering and disordering in the bound and unbound base-pairs of the intermediate bubbles. We re-examine this in a controlled denaturation study with picoliter solutions of DNA molecules confined in a resonating microfluidic cantilever.
After revision: A double-stranded DNA unravels thermally through intermediate denatured bubble segments. Intrinsically, fluctuations ensue at the bubble boundaries from non-equilibrium (NE) energy exchanges with the environment. However, such details gets obscured by large population kinetics at the macroscale, associating equilibrium pathway to the unravelling landscape. In this work, we capture evidence of fluctuation energetics with picoliter samples in a microfluidic cantilever.