Department of CD Spectroscopy of Nucleic Acids, Institute of Biophysics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, vvi, Brno, Czech Republic.
Chirality. 2012 Sep;24(9):691-8. doi: 10.1002/chir.22064. Epub 2012 Jun 14.
Nucleic acids bear the genetic information and participate in its expression and evolution during replication, repair, recombination, transcription, and translation. These phenomena are mostly based on recognition of nucleic acids by proteins. The major factor enabling the specific recognition is structure. Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is very useful to study secondary structures of nucleic acids, in general, and DNA, in particular. CD sensitively reflects isomerizations among distinct conformational states. The isomerizations may operate as molecular switches regulating various physiological or pathological processes. Here, we review CD spectra of nucleic acids, beginning with early studies on natural DNA molecules through analyses of synthetic polynucleotides to study of selected genomic fragments.
核酸承载着遗传信息，并在复制、修复、重组、转录和翻译过程中参与其表达和进化。这些现象主要基于蛋白质对核酸的识别。使特异性识别成为可能的主要因素是结构。圆二色性（CD）光谱非常有助于研究核酸的二级结构，特别是 DNA 的二级结构。CD 灵敏地反映了不同构象状态之间的互变。这些互变可以作为分子开关，调节各种生理或病理过程。在这里，我们通过分析合成多核苷酸来研究天然 DNA 分子，从早期对天然 DNA 分子的研究开始，综述了核酸的 CD 光谱，进而研究了选定的基因组片段。
