The major radiation-induced degradation products of 5.6-dihy dro thymine (1) in aqueous solutions saturated either with O2 or N2O/O2 (75/25 v/v) were identified as thymine (10), the transand cis-isomers of 6-hydroperoxy-5,6-dihydrothymine (5, 7), 5-hydroperoxy-5,6-dihydrothymine (9), and their corresponding hydroxy derivatives (4, 6, 8). The formation of these compounds is explained in terms of...

Thymine-requiring mutants of Escherichia coli were rarely found before the observation by Okada, Yanagisawa, and Ryan (Z. Vererbungslehre 92:403, 1961) that cultures of bacteria grown in the presence of high concentrations of aminopterin, thymine, purines, and serine contain a surprising number of cells unable to synthesize their own supply of thymine. They showed that these thymine-dependent m...

The photo-oxidation of the nucleobase, thymine (Thy), and nucleoside, thymidine (dThy), by dipyridyl (DP) has been investigated in aqueous solution using time-resolved laser flash photolysis. The pH dependence of the oxidation rate constants is measured within a large pH scale. As a consequence, the chemical reactivity of the reactants existing in solution at a certain range of pH is predicted....

UMEROUS thymineless mutants of E. coli, Salmonella, and other bacteria N can be obtained by the aminopterin and thymine method (AM-T method) ( OKADA, YANAGISAWA and RYAN 1961 ; OKADA, HOMMA and SONOHARA 1962). However, in order to sustain normal growth, all the thymineless mutants thus obtained require ten to 20 times the concentration of thymine required by E. coli 15 T(COHEN and BARNER 1954)....

Photo-induced thymine dimer formation was used to probe nucleosome structure in nuclei. The distribution of thymine dimers in the nucleosome and recent studies of the structure of thymine dimer-containing DNA suggest that the rate of thymine dimer formation is affected by the direction and degree of DNA bending. This premise was used to construct a model of the path of DNA in the nucleosome, wh...

Thymine glycol is a DNA damage product of ionizing radiation and other oxidative mutagens. In an attempt to find a noninvasive assay for oxidative DNA damage in individuals, we have developed an HPLC assay for free thymine glycol and thymidine glycol in urine. Our results indicate that humans excrete about 32 nmol of the two glycols per day. Rats, which have a higher specific metabolic rate and...

Electronic coupling V(da) is one of the key parameters that determine the rate of charge transfer through DNA. While there have been several computational studies of V(da) for hole transfer, estimates of electronic couplings for excess electron transfer (ET) in DNA remain unavailable. In the paper, an efficient strategy is established for calculating the ET matrix elements between base pairs in...