Emergence of helicity in double-stranded semiflexible chains with interstrand interactions

Helicity is a fundamental feature of the building blocks of life, namely, DNA, RNA, and proteins. The emergence of helicity in biopolymers is related to the base-stacking interactions but the actual mechanism of helical formation is still not well understood. In this work, we demonstrate how a simple model of semiflexible polymers without latent capability of forming helices can adopt helical conformation via interstrand interactions. Our model consisting of two semiflexible chains dressed with steric effects and are being held together as they are subjected to thermal fluctuations. We regularize the helical handedness of the conformation by imposing a parity-symmetry breaking term. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to understand the statistical mechanics of our model and analyze the qualitative differences in the resulting conformation as the temperature and the model parameters are varied.