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. 1984 Jun 11;12(11):4789–4807. doi: 10.1093/nar/12.11.4789

The structure of d(CGCGAAT[]TCGCG) . d(CGCGAATTCGCG); the incorporation of a thymine photodimer into a B-DNA helix.

S N Rao, J W Keepers, P Kollman
PMCID: PMC318875  PMID: 6739295

Abstract

In the light of the biological significance of thymine photodimers , studies of the energetics of the dodecanucleotide fragment d( CGCGAATTCGCG )2 have been carried out using the methods of molecular mechanics, with and without incorporation of a thymine dimer in the cis-syn configuration. The results of the calculations suggest that the thymine dimerized structures show no gross distortion in the double helix with the conformational changes relative to the normal B-DNA double helix restricted largely to the dimer region. The energetics of dTp[]dT reveal a number of conformers which are energetically almost equally favorable and are, as a group, qualitatively consistent with NMR studies on this molecule. The biological implications of the results of the conformational studies, reported here, have been examined vis-a-vis the currently available models for the recognition of DNA "damage" by repair enzymes.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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