Abstract
We have recently described a new approach to measuring the helical periodicity of random sequence DNA in solution1. It consists of binding short, stiff pieces of DNA to various flat surfaces and using DNase I to probe the most accessible phosphodiester bonds. The differences in length of the fragments produced are measured with high precision to give the helical repeat directly. This approach has now been extended to study the periodicity of defined-sequence DNAs using another enzyme, micrococcal nuclease, as well as DNase I. We find the helical repeat of poly(dA-dT) to be 10.5±<0.1 base pairs (bp), a value very close to that found earlier by us for random-sequence DNA, 10.6±0.1 bp, and confirmed here. Poly(dA).poly(dT) exhibits a distinctly different helical repeat, 10.0±0.1 bp.
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Rhodes, D., Klug, A. Sequence-dependent helical periodicity of DNA. Nature 292, 378–380 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1038/292378a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/292378a0
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