" Like all good memoirs it has not been emasculated by considerations of good taste. " That was Peter Medawar's verdict on The Double Helix, Jim Watson's ebullient succès de scandale. Watson's exuberant style, let it be said right away, is not Maurice Wilkins's. He and Francis Crick were outraged by Watson's account — now a modern classic, at number seven in the American Modern Library's roll o...

Double helix variations of glycol nucleic acids (GNA) are revealed by the atomic resolution crystal structure of a 6mer GNA duplex containing solely Watson-Crick type hydrogen-bonded base pairs.

A four-stranded DNA helix is described that consists of two Watson-Crick double helices wound about the same axis, with no restriction on sequence. Its significance is that it permits a simple topological solution to the problem of unwinding a double helix to separate its strands. If a stretch of Watson-Crick double helix is supercoiled on itself as many times as it has helical turns it has no ...

Substrate recognition by the Neurospora Varkud satellite ribozyme depends on the formation of a magnesium-dependent kissing-loop interaction between the stem-loop I (SLI) substrate and stem-loop V (SLV) of the catalytic domain. From mutagenesis studies, it has been established that this I/V kissing-loop interaction involves three Watson-Crick base pairs and is associated with a structural rearr...

The UV spectra of three different conformers of the guanine/cytosine base pair were recorded recently with UV-IR double-resonance techniques in a supersonic jet [Abo-Riziq, A., Grace, L., Nir, E., Kabelac, M., Hobza, P. & de Vries, M. S. (2005) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 102, 20-23]. The spectra provide evidence for a very efficient excited-state deactivation mechanism that is specific for the ...

Explicit solvent and counterion molecular dynamics simulations have been carried out for a total of >80 ns on the bacterial and spinach chloroplast 5S rRNA Loop E motifs. The Loop E sequences form unique duplex architectures composed of seven consecutive non-Watson-Crick basepairs. The starting structure of spinach chloroplast Loop E was modeled using isostericity principles, and the simulation...

Bullying behaviour is a common experience for a significant minority of children and adolescents. Bullying is the sysematic abuse of power among peers or siblings (Sharp & Smith, 1994, p. 2; Wolke & Samara, 2004), with adverse effects n mental health in a significant number of victims (Stassen Berger, 2007). Physical bullying is characterised by observable, xternalised behaviours including bein...

OF THE DISSERTATION Large Scale Integration, Analysis, and Visualization of Biological Data By Vishal Rajesh Patel Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Irvine, 2014 Professor Pierre Baldi, Chair Data from decades of life sciences research and literature is being curated and made available for searching and analysis. While considerable work has been done to integrat...

The thermodynamic contributions to duplex formation of all 32 possible single-nucleotide dangling ends on a Watson-Crick pair are reported. In most instances, dangling ends are stabilizing with free energy contributions ranging from +0.48 (GT(A)) to-0.96 kcal/mol (). In comparison, Watson-Crick nearest-neighbor increments range from -0. 58 (TA/AT) to -2.24 (GC/CG) kcal/mol. Hence, in some cases...

SUMMARY The explosion of interest in non-coding RNAs, together with improvements in RNA X-ray crystallography, has led to a rapid increase in RNA structures at atomic resolution from 847 in 2005 to 1900 in 2010. The success of whole-genome sequencing has led to an explosive growth of unaligned homologous sequences. Consequently, there is a compelling and urgent need for user-friendly tools for ...