Capture of cationic ligands bound diffusely to base pairs during DNA refolding

Abstract

We obtained the intrinsic binding affinity for metal ions, polyamines, and oligolysine peptides diffusely bound to base-paired sites in DNA by monitoring the shift of the hairpin–duplex equilibrium of the self-complementary DNAsequences, which can be widely used for capturing cationic ligands bound diffusely to nucleotide base pairs.