Figure 6.

(a) Effective force driving shearing and unzipping in the studied structures ranges between 3.5 and 6 pN. (b) Replacing the main duplex with a polymer with higher persistence length dramatically increases the transition barrier difference between shearing and unzipping, as shown for hypothetical persistence lengths l_p = 60 and 80 nm. The activation energies from ref (28) at a constant force of 11.8 pN are also shown as a benchmark; the constant force shear–unzip gap is readily surpassed.