Conserved sequence preference in DNA binding among recombination proteins: an effect of ssDNA secondary structure

Open Access

1 January 1999

journal article
research article
Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Nucleic Acids Research

Vol. 27 (2) , 596-600
https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/27.2.596

Abstract

Repetitive sequences have been proposed to be recombinogenic elements in eukaryotic chromosomes. We tested whether dinucleotide repeats sequences are preferential sites for recombination because of their high affinity for recombination enzymes. We compared the kinetics of the binding of the scRad51, hsRad51 and ecRecA proteins to oligonucleotides with repeats of dinucleotides GT, CA, CT, GA, GC or AT. Since secondary structures in single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) act as a barrier to complete binding we measured whether these oligonucleotides are able to form stable secondary structures. We show that the preferential binding of recombination proteins is conserved among the three proteins and is influenced mainly by secondary structures in ssDNA.

Keywords

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