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Investigating local conformations of double-stranded DNA by low-energy circular dichroism of pyrrolo-cytosine

Overview of Johnson NP et al.

AuthorsJohnson NP  Baase WA  von Hippel PH  
AffiliationInstitut de Pharmacologie et de Biologie Structurale   Unité Mixte de Recherche 5089   Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique   205 route de Narbonne   31077 Toulouse   France. neil@ipbs.fr  
JournalProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Year 2005

Abstract


Local base stacking and conformational mobility play a major role in the structure and function of nucleic acids. We have recently shown that the low-energy CD spectrum of 2-aminopurine (2-AP), i.e., the CD spectral region above 300 nm, can be used to monitor conformational changes in polynucleotides at or near mono- and dinucleotide 2-AP residues that replace adenine residues in DNA and RNA. Here, we extend this technique to pyrrolo-cytosine (PC), a fluorescent analogue of cytosine. The low-energy CD spectrum of a PC dinucleotide in dsDNA exhibits an exciton couplet with two bands of opposite sign centered at 350 nm. This signal is characteristic of base stacking between adjacent PC residues in a right helical conformation. Isolated PC nucleotide residues inserted into polynucleotide chains also display chirality that reflects the asymmetric environment of their sequence context. Thus, we show that the low-energy CD spectra of C(PC)A and A(PC)C sequences in dsDNA have opposite signs. It appears that the measurement of the low-energy CD spectra of PC residues will usefully complement 2-AP measurements by serving to characterize the local conformations and dynamics of nucleic acids near C residues and G-C base pairs.