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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 25: Posters: DNA/RNA and related enzymes

BP 25.8: Poster

Dienstag, 17. März 2015, 14:00–16:00, Poster A

DNA hybridization and kinetics of hairpin-loop molecules — •Mina Mohammadi-Kambs, Björn Ackermann, and Albrecht Ott — Saarland university, FR 7.2, Biologische Experimentalphysik, 66123 Saarbrücken

In the cell, molecular information processing is based on molecular recognition and binding. Although DNA hybridization is sometimes understood as 'lock and key'. It is not clear how two molecules can identify each other. We find that there are many possibilities of different single strands of DNA at a given length that can bind to a given surface bound probe in thermal equilibrium. In other words, many keys can coexist for one lock. There are some groups of sequences, which do not bind to a probe like the ones with runs of guanine bases or self-complementary sequences. At the same time we look at the behavior of corresponding DNA hairpin-loop molecules. We investigate their thermal fluctuation by using a combination of fluorescence energy transfer and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. We measure the rate of opening and closing for different sequences with different stem or loop length. In future work we will look at the behavior of DNA hairpin-loop molecule in the presence of competitive targets to see how they identify their complementary probe. This is a first approach towards understanding how molecular recognition works in the crowded and competitive environment of the cell.