Measuring the Adsorption Cross-Section of YOYO-1 to Immobilized DNA Molecules

Many interactions between small molecules and particles occur in solutions. They are surrounded by other molecules that do not react, for example, biological processes in water, chemical reactions in gas or liquid solutions, and environmental reactions in air and water. Predicting the rate of such interactions involves an understanding of a fundamental process called diffusion, the random motion of molecules in solutions exampled by the famous Brownian motion of pollen particles. It has been challenging to conceptualize a mathematical equation to describe the rate, for example calculating the summed probability of all diffusive molecules finding an immobilized target molecule at an interface within a certain period, the elementary step of adsorption and absorption. In this report, we introduced an equation developed very recently to predict the adsorption rate and measured the staining rate of a DNA molecule with a simple organic dye molecule YOYO-1. The adsorption cross-section of the interaction is extracted for the first time to be consistent with the physical sizes of the molecules. This could be an important step toward a genderized method to predict the adsorption rate of many reactions.