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Characterization Of The Saturation Level Of Nucleosome Arrays And Plasmids By Mnase Digestion, Wenjie Liu, Nathan Nurse, Chongli Yuan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Studying processes involving DNA such as DNA replication and transcription is best done in the context of chromatin because the structure of DNA influences the efficiency of such processes. Chromatin structure is derived from DNA wrapping around histone octamers with the histone octamer density termed saturation level. For in vitro studies on DNA replication and transcription, it is important to maintain a constant saturation level so that saturation level can be removed as a variable. Our goal is to characterize the saturation level of plasmids using the rate of MNase digestion. MNase digestions were first performed on reconstituted nucleosome arrays …