A new mechanism for accessing damaged DNA

UV light damages the DNA of skin cells, which can lead to skin cancer. But this process is counteracted by DNA repair machinery, acting as a molecular sunscreen. It has been unclear, however, how repair proteins work on DNA ...

How DNA is read and copied

Two scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have unraveled aspects of how DNA organizes and preserves genetic information. Newly published research by Cynthia Wolberger, Ph.D., and James Berger, Ph.D., ...

Bending DNA costs less energy than assumed

The way DNA folds largely determines which genes are read out. John van Noort and his group have quantified how easily rolled-up DNA parts stack. This costs less energy than previously assumed. Publication in Biophysical ...

Genome-wide rules of nucleosome phasing in drosophila

LMU researchers have, for the first time, systematically determined the positioning of the packing units of the fruit fly genome and discovered a new protein that defines their relationship to the DNA sequence.

Slip-sliding away…

In the cell nucleus, the genomic DNA is packaged into a tightly condensed form, which is referred to as chromatin. The basic unit of chromatin organization is the nucleosome, a DNA-protein complex consisting of a defined ...

Finding the proteins that unpack DNA

A new method allows researchers to systematically identify specialized proteins that unpack DNA inside the nucleus of a cell, making the usually dense DNA more accessible for gene expression and other functions. The method, ...

Molecular biologists compared human and yeast FACT

A protein complex called facilitates chromatin transcription (FACT) plays a role in DNA packing within a nucleus, as well as in oncogenesis. A team of scientists from MSU, working in cooperation with foreign colleagues, have ...

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