Figure 4.
Equilibrium distribution of DNA molecules over the linking number difference, . To analyze the distribution, radioactively labeled DNA topoisomers were separated by agarose gel electrophoresis (A) and the gel was scanned by Phosphorimager (B). The symbols OC and L mark the bands of open circular and linear DNA molecules, correspondingly. (C) Linearized representation of the distribution. The slope of the line on the plot is specified by the distribution variance (see text for details).