Journal
NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH
Volume 33, Issue 14, Pages 4395-4403Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/nar/gki741
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF GENERAL MEDICAL SCIENCES [R01GM065056] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NIGMS NIH HHS [R01 GM065056, GM65056] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 nucleocapsid protein (NC) is a nucleic acid chaperone that catalyzes the rearrangement of nucleic acids into their thermodynamically most stable structures. In the present study, a combination of optical and thermodynamic techniques were used to characterize the influence of NC on the secondary structure, thermal stability and energetics of monomolecular DNA quadruplexes formed by the sequence d(GGTTGGTGTGGTTGG) in the presence of K+ or Sr2+. Circular dichroism studies demonstrate that NC effectively unfolds the quadruplexes. Studies carried out with NC variants suggest that destabilization is mediated by the zinc fingers of NC. Calorimetric studies reveal that NC destabilization is enthalpic in origin, probably owing to unstacking of the G-quartets upon protein binding. In contrast, parallel studies performed on a related DNA duplex reveal that under conditions where NC readily destabilizes and unfolds the quadruplexes, its effect on the DNA duplex is much less pronounced. The differences in NC's ability to destabilize quadruplex versus duplex is in accordance with the higher Delta G of melting for the latter, and with the inverse correlation between nucleic acid stability and the destabilizing activity of NC.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available