A glycol nucleic acid (GNA) with an acyclic propylene glycol phosphodiester backbone forms stable antiparallel duplexes following the Watson-Crick base pairing rules.

had on our lives,” she says. The Crick archive represents the biggest single acquisition the Trust has ever made. Some of the controversial Crick material on display includes documents relating to the disputes that shed light on the role of Rosalind Franklin and includes a copy of the now famous letter from Maurice Wilkins to Crick. “Our dark lady leaves us...” Wilkins wrote, referring to her t...

BACKGROUND Cytosine- and guanine-rich regions of DNA are capable of forming complex structures named i-motifs and G-quadruplexes, respectively. In the present study the solution equilibria at nearly physiological conditions of a 34-base long cytosine-rich sequence and its complementary guanine-rich strand corresponding to the first intron of the n-myc gene were studied. Both sequences, not yet ...

The HDV ribozyme's folding pathway is, by far, the most complex folding pathway elucidated to date for a small ribozyme. It includes 6 different steps that have been shown to occur before the chemical cleavage. It is likely that other steps remain to be discovered. One of the most critical of these unknown steps is the formation of the trans Watson-Crick GU base pair within loop III. The U(23) ...

Why was this? Culture plays a role in science, as it does in other human activities. Culture is defined by what we accept without explanation, what demands an explanation, and what is “aesthetic”. The rapid acceptance of the “elegant” Watson−Crick model can be attributed to the culture of the time. How so? As it turned out, the regularly sized “rungs” on the two strand duplex ladder fit closely...

IZINDABA An anniversary of major medical intere s t passed by virtually unnoticed last month. On 2 April 2003 it was exactly 50 years since the publication of a letter in the journal N a t u re by James Watson and Francis Crick 1. In it, they described the double helix molecular stru c t u re of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) (Fig. 1), a publication which ushered in a new era in medicine. The t...