260d
From Proteopedia
CRYSTAL STRUCTURE OF THE SELF-COMPLEMENTARY 5'-PURINE START DECAMER D(GCACGCGTGC) IN THE A-DNA CONFORMATION-PART II
Overview
The crystal structure of the alternating 5'-purine start decamer d(GCGCGCGCGC) was found to be in the left-handed Z-DNA conformation. Inasmuch as the A.T base pair is known to resist Z-DNA formation, we substituted A.T base pairs in the dyad-related positions of the decamer duplex. The alternating self-complementary decamer d(GCACGCGTGC) crystallizes in a different hexagonal space group, P6(1)22, with very different unit cell dimensions a = b = 38.97 and c = 77.34 A compared with the all-G.C alternating decamer. The A.T-containing decamer has one strand in the asymmetric unit, and because it is isomorphous to some other A-DNA decamers it was considered also to be right-handed. The structure was refined, starting with the atomic coordinates of the A-DNA decamer d(GCGGGCCCGC), by use of 2491 unique reflections out to 1.9-A resolution. The refinement converged to an R value of 18.6% for a total of 202 nucleotide atoms and 32 water molecules. This research further demonstrates that A.T base pairs not only resist the formation of Z-DNA but can also assist the formation of A-DNA by switching the helix handedness when the oligomer starts with a 5'-purine; also, the length of the inner Z-DNA stretch (d(CG)n) is reduced from an octamer to a tetramer. It may be noted that these oligonucleotide properties are in crystals and not necessarily in solutions.
About this Structure
Full crystallographic information is available from OCA.
Reference
Crystal structure of the self-complementary 5'-purine start decamer d(GCACGCGTGC) in the A-DNA conformation. II., Ban C, Sundaralingam M, Biophys J. 1996 Sep;71(3):1222-7. PMID:8873996 Page seeded by OCA on Sat May 3 18:24:15 2008
