Diverse effects of naturally occurring base lesions on the structure and stability of the human telomere DNA quadruplex.

Various base lesions continuously form in cellular nucleic acids and the unrepaired lesions are promutagenic and procarcinogenic. Though natural base lesions have been extensively studied in double-stranded DNA models, these studies are only less than a decade old for non-canonical DNA models, such as quadruplexes. Here we present a report on the effects of three frequently occurring natural lesions that can form in the TTA loops on the structure of the human telomere quadruplex d[AG3(TTAG3)3].

Quadruplex-forming sequences occupy discrete regions inside plant LTR retrotransposons.

Retrotransposons with long terminal repeats (LTR) form a significant proportion of eukaryotic genomes, especially in plants. They have gag and pol genes and several regulatory regions necessary for transcription and reverse transcription. We searched for potential quadruplex-forming sequences (PQSs) and potential triplex-forming sequences (PTSs) in 18 377 full-length LTR retrotransposons collected from 21 plant species.