The vibrational spectra of the nucleic acid bases adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine are calculated in the frame of density functional theory Ž . DFT . In particular we use the Kohn]Sham scheme with gradient corrections for exchange and correlation to determine normal modes, frequencies, and intensities. The DFT results are found to be in good agreement with the experiment. Our computation...

Microarray technology, which has been around for almost two decades, now provides an indispensable service to the biomedical research community. Soaring demand for high-throughput screening of genes potentially associated with cancer and other diseases, as well as the increased need for identifying microorganisms, have substantially opened up the application of this technology to many fields of...

The 5'-end of the P1 promoter of the B-cell lymphoma-2 (bcl-2) gene contains a highly guaninecytosine-rich region, which has a role in the regulation of bcl-2 transcription. Whereas the guanine-rich region has been the focus of recent studies, little attention has been paid to the cytosine-rich strand. Here we examine the structural transitions of the cytosine-rich sequence by means of acid-bas...

The interaction of nucleic acids with basic proteins and polypeptides has been the subject of numerous studies'-9 motivated in large part by the desire to understand the nature of the complexes formed between nucleic acids and histones, the basic proteins which Stedman and Stedman'0 first suggested might play a role in regulation of the biological activity of DNA. A major question which arises ...

Coryneform bacteria have been defined as non-sporing Gram-positive rods with an irregular outline.1 Almost all can be grown aerobically and assigned to the class Actinobacteria which are characterized by a high guaninecytosine content (>50%) and specific 16S rDNA signature nucleotides.2 Some of the genera in this class are environmental bacteria but some (e.g., Actinomyces, Brevibacterium, Cory...

We investigate the role played by DNA promoters as dynamical activators of transport processes of the RNA polymerase along DNA macromolecules, by introducing an effective potential for the kink of a discrete sine-Gordon chain. At any given moment of its life, a cell of a living organism does not express the totality of its genes (the whole genoma of the organism) but only the genes that are nee...