DNA can be viewed as a semiflexible polymer, and represented at a
coarse scale as a continuous helical elastic rod. In this talk, methods
from the theory of Lie groups are used to analyze equilibrium
conformations of helical rod models of DNA with end constraints. When
the ends of a segment of DNA are free to move, the resulting cloud of
reference frames visited by the distal end of the segment relative to
the proximal end can be characterized as a probability density function
on the Euclidean motion group. The relationship between this pdf and
the stiffness parameters of the helical rod model is derived using
methods of noncommutative harmonic analysis.