Hindered intermolecular stacking of anti-parallel telomeric G-quadruplexes
Telomeric G-quadruplexes (G4s) are non-canonical DNA structures composed of TTAGGG repeats. They are extensively studied both as biomolecules key for genome stability and as promising building blocks and functional elements in synthetic biology and nanotechnology. This is why it is extremely important to understand how the interaction between G4s is affected by their topology. We used small-angle x-ray scattering to investigate the end-to-end stacking of antiparallel telomeric G-quadruplexes formed by the sequence AG3(T2AG3)3. To represent the experimental data, we developed a highly efficient coarse-grained fitting tool, which successfully described the samples as an equilibrium mixture of monomeric and dimeric G4 species. Our findings indicate that the antiparallel topology prevents the formation of long multimeric structures under self-crowding conditions, unlike the hybrid/parallel structures formed by the same DNA sequence. This result supports the idea that the stacking of monomeric G-quadruplexes is strongly affected by the presence of diagonal loops.
Authors
- Sara Catalini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8169-3552)
- Valeria Libera
- C. Petrillo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8824-5624)
- Luca Bertini
- A. Orecchini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5227-0019)
- Cristiano De Michele (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8367-0610)
- Alessandro Paciaroni (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3952-1634)
- Bruno Pagano (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7716-9010)
- Lucia Comez (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5160-6844)
- Giorgio Schirò (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8113-4937)
- Renzo Campanella (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2077-2369)
- Valentina Arciuolo
Institutions
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (FR)
- University of Perugia (IT)
- CEA Grenoble (FR)
- Institut de Biologie Structurale (FR)
- University of Naples Federico II (IT)
- Sapienza University of Rome (IT)
- Université Grenoble Alpes (FR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- The Journal of Chemical Physics
- Published
- 2024-09-09
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0225371
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- DNA and Nucleic Acid Chemistry
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.23
Funders
- European Commission
- European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
- Università degli Studi di Perugia
- Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca