Shi-KeWang, Hua-Fei Su, Yu-Chao Gu, Shu-Ling Lin, Jia-Heng Tan, Zhi-Shu Huang, Tian-Miao Ou
Biochemistry and Biophysics Reports
2016 vol: 5 pp: 439-447 doi: 10.1016/j.bbrep.2015.09.022
Abstract
Environments surrounding G-rich sequences remarkably affect the conformations of these structures. A proper evaluation system mimicking the crowded environment in a cell with macromolecules should be developed to perform structural and functional studies on G-quadruplexes. In this study, the topology and stability of a G-quadruplex formed by human telomeric repeat sequences were investigated in a macromolecule-crowded environment created by polyethylene glycol 200 (PEG200), tumor cell extract, and Xenopus laevis egg extract. The interactions between small molecules and telomeric G-quadruplexes were also evaluated in the different systems. The results suggested that the actual behavior of G-quadruplex structures in cells extract is quite different from that in the PEG crowding system, and proteins or other factors in extracts might play a very important role in G-quadruplex structures.
Topics: Complex samples, Aromatic compounds, Macromolecular, Nucleic acids DNA, Nucleotides, Monolith – MicroScale Thermophoresis, MST, Proteins, Publications
