Reconsidered DNA conformations in crystal structures

DNAの結晶構造中の構造ゆらぎの解析

角南 智子; 河野 秀俊

Sunami, Tomoko; Kono, Hidetoshi

Conformational flexibility of DNA plays important roles on biological processes such as transcriptional regulations. Therefore, it is important to analyze when and how DNA shows conformational variations. Electron density maps in crystallographic analyses contain information of conformational variations. But such information is typically discarded in the refinement process. To extract the information about conformational variations, we have performed comprehensive analysis of the electron density maps of DNA crystals. We found that positive FoFc densities are observed more frequently around phosphates than around bases, indicating high flexibility of DNA phosphates. In the presentation, we will discuss more details.