Abstract
Osmium tetroxide (OsO4) reacts with the thymine residues of double-stranded DNA, but thymines that are unpaired or under torsional stress are hyperreactive. Although OsO4 hyperreactivity has been primarily utilized to identify Z-DNA structures in supercoiled plasmids, OsO4 will also identify other torsional perturbations of DNA. In this study, OsO4 was used to footprint an AT-rich region (between −780 and −500) of the maizeAdh1 promoter. Hyperreactive sites were identified bothin vitro andin vivo in an area that coincides with AT motifs similar to those found in scaffold attachment regions. Further, the region of OsO4 hyperreactivity lies within a fragment of DNA that is associated with the nuclear scaffold in histone-depleted nuclei.
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Paul, AL., Ferl, R.J. Osmium tetroxide footprinting of a scaffold attachment region in the maizeAdh1 promoter. Plant Mol Biol 22, 1145–1151 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00028983
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00028983