We report on the nature of the thermal denaturation transition of homogeneous
DNA as determined from a renormalisation group analysis of the
Peyrard-Bishop-Dauxois model. Our approach is based on an analogy with the
phenomenon of critical wetting that goes further than previous qualitative
comparisons, and shows that the transition is continuous for the average
base-pair separation. However, since the range of universal critical behaviour
appears to be very narrow, numerically observed denaturation transitions may
look first-order, as it has been reported in the literature.Comment: 6 pages; no figures; to appear in Europhysics Letter
