thumb|right|250px|Nucleic acid melting curve showing hyperchromicity as a function of temperature Hyperchromicity is the increase of absorbance (optical density) of a material. The most famous example is the hyperchromicity of DNA that occurs when the DNA duplex is denatured. The UV absorption is increased when the two single DNA strands are being separated, either by heat or by addition of denaturant or by increasing the pH level. The opposite, a decrease of absorbance is called hypochromicity.
thumb|right|250px|Nucleic acid melting curve showing hyperchromicity as a function of temperature Hyperchromicity is the increase of absorbance (optical density) of a material. The most famous example is the hyperchromicity of DNA that occurs when the DNA duplex is denatured. The UV absorption is increased when the two single DNA strands are being separated, either by heat or by addition of denaturant or by increasing the pH level. The opposite, a decrease of absorbance is called hypochromicity.
==Hyperchromicity in DNA denaturation== Heat denaturation of DNA, also called melting, causes the double helix structure to unwind to form single stranded DNA. When DNA in solution is heated above its melting temperature (usually more than 80 °C), the double-stranded DNA unwinds to form single-stranded DNA. The bases become unstacked and can thus absorb more light. In their native state, the bases of DNA absorb light in the 260-nm wavelength region. When the bases become unstacked, the wavelength of maximum absorbance does not change, but the amount absorbed increases by 37%. A double stranded DNA strand dissociating to two single strands produces a sharp cooperative transition.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).