  The strength of the spin-orbit interaction relevant to transport in a low
dimensional structure depends critically on the relative geometrical
arrangement of current carrying orbitals. Recent tight-binding orbital models
for spin transport in DNA-like molecules, have surmised that the band
spin-orbit coupling arises from the particular angular relations between
orbitals of neighboring bases on the helical chain. Such arrangement could be
probed by inducing deformations in the molecule in a conductive probe AFM type
setup, as it was recently reported by Kiran, Cohen and Naaman\cite{Kiran}. Here
we report deformation dependent spin selectivity when a double strand DNA model
is compressed or stretched. We find that the equilibrium geometry is not
optimal with respect to the SO coupling strength and thus spin selectivity can
be tuned by deformations. The latter can be increased by stretching the helical
structure taking into account its elastic properties through the Poisson ratio.
The spin filtering gap is also found to be tunable with uniaxial deformations.
