RNA tertiary interactions or tertiary motifs are conserved structural patterns formed by pairwise interactions between nucleotides. They include base-pairing, base-stacking, and base-phosphate interactions. A-minor motifs are the most common tertiary interactions in the large ribosomal subunit. The A-minor motif is a nucleotide triple in which minor groove edges of an adenine base are inserted ...

A new complex, manganese(II) azide complex with N-methylimidazole, has been synthesized and characterized by elemental analysis, IR spectra and single crystal X-ray studies. Absorption spectroscopy, emission spectroscopy, viscosity measurements and CD spectroscopy have been used to investigate the binding of the complex with calf thymus DNA (CTDNA). The intrinsic binding constant K(b) of the co...

The formation of Antiparallel-Parallel-Combination (APC) DNA, a liner duplex with a segment of parallel-stranded (ps) helix flanked by conventional B-DNA, was tested with a number of synthetic oligonucleotides. The groove-binding ligand distamycin A (DstA) was used to stabilize the ps segment comprising five A x T base pairs. Two drug molecules bound per APC, one in each of the two equivalent g...

BACKGROUND There is a lack of evidence on the relationship between prematurity and palatal abnormalities. The aim of this study was to evaluate the incidence of palatal groove, the associated factors and the persistence time in preterm infants from birth to 24 months of age. METHODS The children's data, medical history and eating habits were collected using a questionnaire answered by the leg...

The crystal structure of a B-type DNA hexanucleotide duplex complexed with the porphyrin molecule nickel-[tetra-N-methyl-pyridyl] porphyrin has been solved by multiwavelength anomalous diffraction phasing and refined to an R factor of 11.5% at a resolution of 0.9 A. The structure has been solved and refined as two crystallographically independent duplexes, stacked end to end. Contrary to expect...

Pumping is a vital natural process, imitated by humans for thousands of years. We demonstrate that a hitherto undocumented mechanism of fluid transport pumps nectar onto the hummingbird tongue. Using high-speed cameras, we filmed the tongue-fluid interaction in 18 hummingbird species, from seven of the nine main hummingbird clades. During the offloading of the nectar inside the bill, hummingbir...

This experiment explored the effects of controlled manipulations of three parameters of tactile gratings, groove width (1.07-2.53 mm), contact force (30-90 g), and scanning speed (40-120 mm/s), on the responses of cells in second somatosensory cortex (SII) of awake monkeys that were performing a groove-width classification task with passively presented stimuli. A previous experiment involving a...

Slowed gait in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) can be improved when patients synchronize footsteps to isochronous metronome cues, but limited retention of such improvements suggest that permanent cueing regimes are needed for long-term improvements. If so, music might make permanent cueing regimes more pleasant, improving adherence; however, music cueing requires patients to synchronize ...

The double-stranded DNA of the genome contains both sequence information directly relating to the protein and RNA coding as well as functional and structural information relating to protein recognition. Only recently is the importance of DNA shape in this recognition process being fully appreciated, and it also appears that minor groove electronegative potential may contribute significantly in ...