Figure 6.

T7 RNAP elongation behavior from highly bent templates. Transcription from the overtwisted template (^OT, blue squares) is roughly four times slower than from the most untwisted template (^+UT, black circles), but is also more processive. The moderately untwisted template (^UT, red triangles), by comparison, shows an elongation velocity comparable to ^OT, but the processivity of ^+UT. Both the elongation velocity and processivity measured from each minicircle is significantly repressed compared to a negatively supercoiled, 2536 bp circular plasmid (green diamonds, inset).