Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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MM: Fachverband Metall- und Materialphysik

MM 39: Biomaterials and Biopolymers I (joint session CPP/BP/MM)

MM 39.3: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 15:30–16:00, H40

Competing oligonucleotide macromolecules: binding preferences instead of a ménage a trois — •Albrecht Ott — Biologische Experimentalphysik, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany

The description of macromolecular recognition is usually reduced to the consideration of molecular pairs. In the simplest descriptions the receptor pairs exhibit a lock and key interaction, which mainly depends on the shape of the molecular recognizers, and this is supposed to lead to a highly specific recognition process. Much more refined and quantitative physical descriptions have been proposed, however, they are again based on pairwise interaction, and we remain far from understanding molecular binding in competition as it occurs in a biological organism. Here we present experiments on DNA macromolecular binding in competition. We identify situations where the binding constant of one DNA strand is highly dependent on the presence of another, very similar competitor. We interpret our findings as the result of an interaction term that leads to a formal equivalent of a Landau phase transition. We present experimental results from in vitro transcription assays that highlight the existence of other non-trivial competitive situations that may act along similar lines.