The CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas9 system recently emerged as a transformative genome-editing technology that is innovating basic bioscience and applied medicine and biotechnology. The endonuclease Cas9 associates with a guide RNA to match and cleave complementary sequences in double stranded DNA, forming an RNA:DNA hybrid and a displaced non-target DNA ...

neuroserpin, a member of the serine proteinase inhibitor (serpin) superfamily, is known to be a neuroprotective factor in the focal ischemic stroke followed by reducing the microglial activation. neuroserpin is a protein rich of methionine residues that can scavenge the free radical species which may increase its neuroprotective effect. on the other hand, the oxidative modifications of the amin...

aptamers, or single stranded oligonucleotides, are produced by systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment, abbreviated as selex. in the amplification and regeneration step of selex technique, dsdna is conversed to ssdna. asymmetric pcr is one of the methods used for the generation of ssdna. the purpose of this study was to design a random dna library for selection of aptamers wit...

The preparation and circular dichroic (CD) studies of self-complimentary 8-mer DNA sequences with a porphyrin at the 3' end are presented. Electronic interaction between the two porphyrins (the interchromophoric distance is in the range of 28-40 A), attached to both ends of the double-stranded helix, gives rise to a long-range exciton-coupled CD in the visible region (400-450 nm). The porphyrin...

The mechanisms by which hydrophobic molecules, such as long-chain fatty acids, enter cells are poorly understood. In Gram-negative bacteria, the lipopolysaccharide layer in the outer membrane is an efficient barrier for fatty acids and aromatic hydrocarbons destined for biodegradation. We report crystal structures of the long-chain fatty acid transporter FadL from Escherichia coli at 2.6 and 2....

Using a first-principles linear response theory, the capacitance of the DNA nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, are calculated. The difference in the capacitance between the nucleotides is studied with respect to conformational distortion. The result suggests that although an alternate current capacitance measurement of a single-stranded DNA chain threaded through a nanogap el...

Locked nucleic acid (LNA) is a nucleic acid analogue containing one or more LNA nucleotide monomers with a bicyclic furanose unit locked in an RNA mimicking sugar conformation. This conformational restriction results in unprecedented hybridization affinity towards complementary single stranded RNA and thus, makes LNA uniquely suited for mimicking RNA structures and sequence specific targeting o...

Single stranded DNA (ssDNA) equilibrium dynamics are investigated using a fluorophore/quencher-labeled hairpin structure which thermally fluctuates between open and closed states. Temporal correlations of the fluorescence fluctuations are used to determine the energy barrier to conformational change. We find that ssDNA distortion is purely entropic for poly(T) but requires an additional enthalp...

We have developed a microfluidic mixer for studying protein folding and other reactions with a mixing time of 8 mus and sample consumption of femtomoles. This device enables us to access conformational changes under conditions far from equilibrium and at previously inaccessible time scales. In this paper, we discuss the design and optimization of the mixer using modeling of convective diffusion...

Minisatellite isoallelism, i.e. the occurrence of minisatellite alleles with different internal sequence composition but indistinguishable length, is a common limitation of minisatellite allele length analysis. Internal sequence variation can be used to distinguish such isoalleles, provided that detailed sequence knowledge of its basis is available. We now show that minisatellite isoalleles can...