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General information
In biologically important regions of DNA there are guanine rich and cytosine rich unique sequences which have regulative function in processes that take place in a cell and during the cell activity can form the structures like G-quadruplex and I-motif. G-quadruplex and I-motif structures inhibit the telomer synthesis in a cell or oncogene expression leading to the cell’s death. The new direction of antitumor therapy has been formed which is based on formation and destruction of G-quadruplexes and I-motives in selected regions of DNA. The conformational changes of DNA and DNA-cosolvent interactions are conditioned by thermodynamic forces and due to that the understanding the nature of forces stabilizing or destabilizing G-quadruplex and I-motif structures relative to the single and double stranded DNA conformations has crucial importance. It will allow clarifying the biological role of molecular switches in genome. In the framework of this project, it is planned to investigate the I-motif + G-quadruplex ↔ duplex and I-motif + G- quadruplex ↔ coil structural transitions of 1:1 mixture of guanine-rich (Tel22-G) and its complementary cytosine-rich (Tel22-C) 22-meric sequences of human telomeric DNA depending on temperature, pH, urea and Na+ concentrations.
