  We study the unexpected high flexibility of short dsDNA which recently has
been reported by a number of experiments. Via the Langevin dynamics simulation
of our Breathing DNA model, first we observe the formation of bubbles within
the duplex and also forks at the ends, with the size distributions independent
of the contour length. We find that these local denaturations at a
physiological temperature, despite their rare and transient presence, can lower
the persistence length drastically for a short DNA segment in agreement with
experiment.
