Nucleic Acids Research, Vol 26, Issue 17 3967-3970, Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press
C Russmann, J Stollhof, C Weiss, R Beigang and M Beato
Nucleic acid-protein interactions are essential for storage, reproduction
and expression of genetic information. Biochemical methods, such as
dimethyl sulfate genomic footprinting, have been developed to study stable
protein-DNA interactions in vivo and chemical crosslinking has been used
for less stable interactions, but the chemical agents are slow, damage
cells and perturb native equilibria. To avoid these perturbations, UV laser
crosslinking offers an alternative, although the energies required for
significant crosslinking cause extensive DNA damage. We find that a
combination of femtosecond laser pulses at two different wavelengths, in
the UV and the visible range, increases the crosslinking efficiency while
minimizing DNA damage. This technique also allowed us to directly measure
the singlet S1lifetime of native DNA (tauS1 = 3.2 +/- 0.2 ps), which is
mainly determined by the lifetime of thymine [tauS1 = 2.8 +/- 0.4 ps for
(dT)16], the photochemically most reactive base. Our results suggest that
two wavelength femtosecond laser pulses are well suited for the
identification of transcription factors interacting with defined sequences
and for studying the kinetics of protein-nucleic acid interactions in
intact cells.
ARTICLES
Two wavelength femtosecond laser induced DNA-protein crosslinking
Fachbereich Physik, Universitat Kaiserslautern, Erwin-Schrodinger- Strasse 46, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany.
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