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SYLS: Life Sciences on the Nanometer Scale - Physics Meets Biology

SYLS 3: Symposium "Life Sciences on the Nanometer Scale - Physics Meets Biology"

SYLS 3.31: Poster

Wednesday, March 10, 2004, 16:00–18:30, B

Specific Binding of a Single Peptide to DNA investigated by AFM Force Spectroscopy — •Rainer Eckel¹, Sven David Wilking², Alexandra Ros¹, Norbert Sewald², Robert Ros¹, and Dario Anselmetti¹ — ¹Experimental Biophysics and Applied Nanosciences, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstr. 25, 33615 Bielefeld — ²Organic and Bioorganic Chemistry, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstr. 25, 33615 Bielefeld

Peptides mimicking protein epitopes serve as excellent model systems for the investigation of the specific molecular recognition between DNA and transcriptional regulators. Our studies focus on the functional characterization of synthetic peptide segments taken from the sequence of the transcriptional activator E. coli PhoB by means of single molecule techniques. AFM dynamic force spectroscopy and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy investigations proove the specifity of the binding, yielding force-related properties and kinetic data such as thermal rate constants. Further studies involve variation of the recognizing peptide sequence in order to taylor and indentify the optimal structure that ensures binding specificity.