Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Dna Linking Number Change Induced By Sequence-Specific Dna-Binding Proteins, Bo Chen, Yazhong Xiao, Chang Liu, Chen-Zhong Li, Fenfei Leng

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins play a key role in many fundamental biological processes, such as transcription, DNA replication and recombination. Very often, these DNA-binding proteins introduce structural changes to the target DNA-binding sites including DNA bending, twisting or untwisting and wrapping, which in many cases induce a linking number change (ΔLk) to the DNA-binding site. Due to the lack of a feasible approach, ΔLk induced by sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins has not been fully explored. In this paper we successfully constructed a series of DNA plasmids that carry many tandem copies of a DNA-binding site for one sequence-specific DNA-binding …