Experiment and prediction: a productive symbiosis in studies on the thermodynamics of DNA oligomers.

Recently, we reported the kinetics of hybridization of cDNA dodecamers (Carrillo-Nava, E., Mejía-Radillo, Y., and Hinz, H.

Dodecamer DNA duplex formation is characterized by second-order kinetics, positive activation energies, and a dependence on sequence and Mg2+ ion concentration.

This study provides quantitative information about the kinetics of formation of a complex between DNA oligomers having 12 bp. The DNA dodecamers were designed in such a way as to avoid the formation of hairpins or slipped duplex structures within single strands. The hybridization was carried out employing stopped-flow techniques.