The non-structural protein 13 (nsp13) of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is a helicase that separates double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) or DNA (dsDNA) with a 5' → 3' polarity, using the energy of nucleotide hydrolysis. We determined the minimal mechanism of helicase function by nsp13. We showed a clear unwinding lag with increasing length of the double-stranded region of the ...

Nucleic acids contain severa' characteristic structural features: a chiral center adjacent to the base, a stereoregular, hydrophilic poly(phosphate-ribose) backbone which is negatively charged at neutral pH, and a helical secondary structure arising from conformational preferences enforced by base-stacking. We have prepared and studied several synthetic polynucleotide analogs having linear poly...

BACKGROUND To explore practical applications of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in biomedical fields the properties of their interaction with biomolecules must be revealed. Recent years, the interaction of CNTs with biomolecules is a subject of research interest for practical applications so that previous research explored that CNTs have complementary structure properties with single strand DNA (ssDNA)...

development of potent new anti-shigella agents for rapid and specific detection and treatment is of great importance. aptamers, nucleic acid oligomers capable of specific binding to a wide range of non-nucleic acid targets, may be of value for this purpose. in the present study, we used a systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (selex) process to select dna aptamers that b...

The base pairs in double helical nucleic acids have been compared to see how they can be recognized by proteins. We conclude that a single hydrogen bond is inadequate for uniquely identifying any particular base pair, as this leads to numerous degeneracies. However, using two hydrogen bonds, fidelity of base pair recognition may be achieved. We propose specific amino-acid side chain interaction...

The application of optical rot,atory dispersion to nucleic acids and polynucleotides is fairly recent (l-6). Doty et cd. (2) made a comprehensive study of the optical rotatory dispersion of deoxyribonucleic acid, ribonucleic acid, and complexes of some homopolynucleotides; their results strongly suggested a close relationship between the optical rotations and the secondary structure of nucleic ...

background & objectives: antisense peptide nucleic acids (pna) that target growth essential genes show potent bactericidal properties without cell lysis. we considered the possibility that whether pna treatment influence the bacteria total nucleic acids content and apply approach to develop a new delivery system to dendritic cells (dcs). dcs are the most potent antigen presenting cells in t...

We describe a graph theoretic method designed to perform efficient searches for substructural patterns in nucleic acid structural coordinate databases using a simplified vectorial representation. Two vectors represent each nucleic acid base and the relative positions of bases with respect to one another are described in terms of distances between the defined start and end points of the vectors ...

Abstract Nucleic acids are natural macromolecules with the ability to store and transmit information based on strict base‐pairing principle. Beyond nucleic acid double helixes, various DNA/RNA nanostructures customized geometries functionalities have been fabricated. Featured programmability sequence‐dependent responsiveness, employed for rational design construction of logic devices. When stim...