Reconstructing multiple free energy pathways of DNA stretching from single molecule experiments.

Free energy landscapes provide information on the dynamics of proteins and nucleic acid folding. It has been demonstrated that such landscapes can be reconstructed from single molecule force measurement data using Jarzynski's equality, which requires only stretching data. However, when the process is reversible, the Crooks fluctuation theorem combines both stretch and relaxation force data for the analysis and can offer more rapid convergence of free energy estimates of different states. Here we demonstrate that, similar to Jarzynski's equality, the Crooks fluctuation theorem can be used to reconstruct the full free energy landscapes. In addition, when the free energy landscapes exhibit multiple folding pathways, one can use Jarzynski's equality to reconstruct individual free energy pathways if the experimental data show distinct work distributions. We applied the method to reconstruct the overstretching transition of poly(dA) to demonstrate that the nonequilibrium work theorem combined with single molecule force measurements provides a clear picture of the free energy landscapes.