Extracting Thermodynamic Data From Equilibrium Melting Curves for Oligonucleotide Order-Disorder Transitions

A large number of research groups have focused considerable effort toward thermodynamically characterizing melting transitions in nucleic acid molecules. This interest reflects the fact that the resulting thermodynamic data permit one to define the nature of the molecular forces that control nucleic acid structures, while also providing a data base for predicting the stability and the temperature-dependent melting behavior of these structures.