Authors: Vorlícková, Michaela; Kejnovská, Iva; Kovanda, Jirí; Kypr, Jaroslav

Source: Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 26, Number 6, 15 March 1998 , pp. 1509-1514(6)

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Abstract:

CD spectroscopy and PAGE were used to cooperatively analyze melting conformers of DNA strands containing GA and TA dinucleotide repeats. The 20mer (GA)<INF>10</INF> formed a homoduplex in neutral solutions containing physiological concentrations of salts and this homoduplex was not destabilized even in the terminal (GA)<INF>3</INF> hexamers of (GA)<INF>3</INF>(TA)<INF>4</INF>(GA)<INF>3</INF>, although the central (TA)<INF>4</INF> portion of this oligonucleotide preserved the conformation adopted by (TA)<INF>10</INF>. This observation demonstrates that homoduplexes of alternating GA and TA sequences can co-exist in a single DNA molecule. Another 20mer, (GATA)<INF>5</INF>, adopted as a whole either the AT duplex, like (TA)<INF>10</INF>, or the GA duplex, like (GA)<INF>10</INF>, and switched between them reversibly. The concentration of salt controlled the conformational switching. Hence, guanine and thymine share significant properties regarding complementarity to adenine, while the TA and GA sequences can stack in at least two mutually compatible ways within the DNA duplexes analyzed here. These properties extend our knowledge of non-canonical structures of DNA.

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 1998-03-15

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• Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) is a fully Open Access journal, providing rapid publication of leading edge research into the nucleic acids under the following categories: chemistry, computational biology, genomics, molecular biology, nucleic acid enzymes, RNA and structural biology. There is a Survey and Summary section, and methods papers are published
  in NAR Methods Online. Each year the first issue is devoted to biological databases, and a later issue to relevant web-based software resources.

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