{"doi":"10.1063/5.0109361","title":"DNA fragmentation in a steady shear flow","abstract":"We have determined the susceptibility of T4 DNA (166 kilobase pairs, kbp) to fragmentation under steady shear in a cone-and-plate rheometer. After shearing for at least 30 min at a shear rate of 6000s−1, corresponding to a Reynolds number of O(103) and a Weissenberg number of O(103), 97.9±1.3% of the sample is broken into a polydisperse mixture with a number-averaged molecular weight of 62.6±3.2 kbp and a polydispersity index of 1.29±0.03, as measured by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (with a 95% confidence interval). The molecular weight distributions observed here from a shear flow are similar to those produced by a (dominantly extensional) sink flow of DNA and are qualitatively different than the midpoint scission observed in simple extensional flow. Given the inability of shear flow to produce a sharp coil–stretch transition, the data presented here support a model where polymers can be fragmented in flow without complete extension. These results further indicate that DNA fragmentation by shear is unlikely to be a significant issue in microfluidic devices, and anomalous molecular weight observations in experiments are due to DNA processing prior to observation in the device.","journal":"Biomicrofluidics","year":2022,"id":278943,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9542,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":951945,"name":"Zixue Ma","orcid":"0000-0001-6112-9922","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":951946,"name":"Clive Onyango","orcid":"0000-0002-6398-273X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":951947,"name":"Xiang Cheng","orcid":"0000-0002-2759-764X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":438410,"name":"Kevin D. Dorfman","orcid":"0000-0003-0065-5157","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":951944,"name":"Yiming Qiao","orcid":"0000-0002-1917-2588","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":47,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:28:51.322666Z","pmid":"36313190","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}