A comparison of the landmark papers by Watson and Crick (1953) and Avery et al. (1944) shows how different rhetorical choices can influence the impact of a scientific paper. The paper by Watson and Crick revolutionized biology and remains a model of scientific rhetoric. In contrast, the paper by Avery et al. reports equally important findings, but its impact was greatly diminished because of rh...

Results from optical melting studies of Watson-Crick complementary heteroduplexes formed between 2'-O-methyl RNA and RNA oligonucleotides are used to determine nearest neighbor thermodynamic parameters for predicting the stabilities of such duplexes. The results are consistent with the physical model assumed by the individual nearest neighbor-hydrogen bonding model, which contains terms for hel...

We recently showed that Watson-Crick base pairs in canonical duplex DNA exist in dynamic equilibrium with G(syn)·C+ and A(syn)·T Hoogsteen base pairs that have minute populations of ∼1%. Here, using nuclear magnetic resonance R1ρ relaxation dispersion, we show that substitution of guanine with the naturally occurring base inosine results in an ∼17-fold increase in the population of transient Ho...

Apart from the massive parallelism of DNA strands, the phenomenon known as Watson-Crick complementarity is basic both in the experiments and theory of DNA computing. The parallelism makes exhaustive searches possible, whereas the complementarity is a powerful computational tool. This paper investigates complementarity as a language-theoretic operation: \bad" words obtained through a generative ...

A new unprecedented metal-mediated base pair was designed that stabilizes reverse Watson-Crick DNA (parallel strand orientation, ps) as well as canonical Watson-Crick DNA (antiparallel strand orientation, aps). This base pair contains two imidazolo-dC units decorated with furan residues. Tm measurements and spectroscopic studies reveal that each silver-mediated furano-imidazolo-dC forms excepti...