Abstract: Biopolymer conformational changes are involved in many biological processes. This thesis summarizes some theoretical and experimental approaches which I have taken at UCLA to explore conformational changes in biopolymers. The reversible thermal denaturation of the DNA double helix is, perhaps, the simplest example of biopolymer conformational change. I have developed a statistical mechanics model of DNA melting with reduced degrees of freedom, which allows base stacking interaction to be taken into account and treat base pairing and stacking separately. Unlike previous models, this model describes both the unpairing and unstacking parts of the experimental melting curves and explains the observed temperature dependence of the effective thermodynamic parameters used in models of the nearest neighbor type. I developed a basic kinetic model for irreversible thermal denaturation of F-actin, which incorporates depolymerization of F-actin from the ends and breaking of F-actin fiber in the middle. The model explains the cooperativity of F-actin thermal denaturation observed by D. Pavlov et al. in differential calorimetry measurements. CG-rich DNA sequences form left-handed Z-DNA at high ionic strength or upon binding of polyvalent ions and some proteins. I studied experimentally the B-to-Z transition of the (CG)₆ dodecamer. Improvement of the locally linearized model used to interpret the data gives evidence for an intermediate state in the B-to-Z transition of DNA, contrary to previous research on this subject. In the past 15 years it has become possible to study the conformational changes of biomolecules using single-molecule techniques. In collaboration with other lab members I performed a single-molecule experiment, where we monitored the displacement of a micrometer-size bead tethered to a surface by a DNA probe undergoing the conformational change. This technique allows probing of conformational changes with subnanometer accuracy. We applied the method to detect, for the first time, single hybridization events of label-free target oligomers. This demonstrates a new paradigm of molecule detection where, hybridization of the target is detected through the conformational change of the probe.