The TREX enzymes process DNA as the major 3'-->5' exonuclease activity in mammalian cells. TREX2 and TREX1 are members of the DnaQ family of exonucleases and utilize a two metal ion catalytic mechanism of hydrolysis. The structure of the dimeric TREX2 enzyme in complex with single-stranded DNA has revealed binding properties that are distinct from the TREX1 protein. The TREX2 protein undergoes ...

The extreme 3'-ends of human telomeres consist of 150-250 nucleotides of single-stranded DNA sequence together with associated proteins. Small-molecule ligands can compete with these proteins and induce a conformational change in the DNA to a four-stranded quadruplex arrangement, which is also no longer a substrate for the telomerase enzyme. The modified telomere ends provide signals to the DNA...

Amyloidogenic neurodegenerative diseases are incurable conditions with high social impact that are typically caused by specific, largely disordered proteins. However, the underlying molecular mechanism remains elusive to established techniques. A favored hypothesis postulates that a critical conformational change in the monomer (an ideal therapeutic target) in these "neurotoxic proteins" trigge...

Single-strand conformational polymorphism and denaturing gel electrophoresis were used to screen for mutations in the protoporphyrinogen oxidase gene (PPOX) of three patients with clinically and biochemically proven variegate porphyria in order to select genomic regions for specific DNA sequence analysis. Two previously undescribed mutations were identified: PPOX1423-1426-delATCT and PPOX2272in...

background: aspergillus species are associated with allergic bronchopulmonary disease, mycotic keratitis, otomycosis, na­sal sinusitis and invasive infection. in this study, we developed a pcr-single strand confomational polymorphism method to identify the most common aspergillus species and we showed some advantages of this method comparing a pcr-restric­tion fragment length polymorphism with ...

Introduction The aim of this study was toinvestigate the sterilization potential of atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ) and interactions of this technology with double-stranded DNA using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) techniques. Materials and Methods The plasma jet was produced through a high voltage sinusoidal power supplyusing a mixt...

Nucleic acid-based biosensors for the detection of specific proteins combine typical programmability synthetic DNA systems with artificially controlled DNA-protein communication. The high-affinity interaction between a target protein and ligand, such as an aptamer sequence, or double stranded domain, small peptide, is paired nature-mimicking molecular mechanism allowing probing, processing, tra...

Double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) viruses such as herpesviruses and bacteriophages infect by delivering their genetic material into cells, a task mediated by a DNA channel called "portal protein." We have used electron cryomicroscopy to determine the structure of bacteriophage P22 portal protein in both the procapsid and mature capsid conformations. We find that, just as the viral capsid undergoes ma...