AI Article Synopsis
- Structural dynamics of nucleic acids and proteins are crucial for their functions, but current techniques struggle to capture these fast, unsynchronized motions.
- A new hybrid single molecule approach combines stochastic data analysis with fluorescence correlation, allowing researchers to investigate these rapid structural dynamics more effectively.
- This study provides the first direct evidence of spontaneous DNA opening at nucleosome termini, which is critical for enabling gene access and suggests that such dynamics are universal, influenced more by salt concentration and protein interactions than by DNA sequence.
Article Abstract
Structural dynamics of nucleic acid and protein is an important physical basis of their functions. These motions are often very difficult to synchronize and too fast to be clearly resolved with the currently available single molecule methods. Here we demonstrate a novel hybrid single molecule approach combining stochastic data analysis with fluorescence correlation that enables investigations of sub-ms unsynchronized structural dynamics of macromolecules. Based on the method, we report the first direct evidence of spontaneous DNA motions at the nucleosome termini. The nucleosome, comprising DNA and a histone core, is the fundamental packing unit of eukaryotic genes that must be accessed during various genome transactions. Spontaneous DNA opening at the nucleosome termini has long been hypothesized to enable gene access in the nucleosome, but has yet to be directly observed. Our approach reveals that DNA termini in the nucleosome open and close repeatedly at 0.1-1 ms(-1). The kinetics depends on salt concentration and DNA-histone interactions but not much on DNA sequence, suggesting that this dynamics is universal and imposes the kinetic limit to gene access. These results clearly demonstrate that our method provides an efficient and robust means to investigate unsynchronized structural changes of DNA at a sub-ms time resolution.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4787812 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkv549 | DOI Listing |
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