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The Effect of Pressure on the Conformational Stability of DNA

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Handbook of Chemical Biology of Nucleic Acids

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Abstract

Studies into the effect of hydrostatic pressure on the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of DNA provide insights into the interactions that stabilize the canonical and noncanonical DNA structures. Under most solution conditions, double- and triple-stranded DNA molecules are stabilized to a small extent by increasing pressure regardless of their nucleotide sequence. On the other hand, the stabilities of noncanonical conformations, including hairpins, Z-DNA, and the tetrahelical DNA forms, G-quadruplexes, and i-motifs, depend on pressure in more subtle ways. While the stability of i-motif is weakly modulated by pressure, G-quadruplex structures tend to be destabilized by pressure with the extent depending on the individual features of the DNA. The pressure sensitivity of a G-quadruplex is attributed to the existence of a void volume in the folded structure and the exposure of central ions to the solvent upon unfolding. For the duplex and G-quadruplex conformations, there are sufficient data to allow the construction of temperature-pressure stability phase diagrams.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Tigran V. Chalikian & Robert B. Macgregor Jr.

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  1. Tigran V. Chalikian
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  2. Robert B. Macgregor Jr.
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Correspondence to Tigran V. Chalikian .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Frontier Institute for Biomolecular Engineering Research (FIBER), Konan University, Kobe, Japan

    Naoki Sugimoto

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  1. Physical Chemistry – Biophysical Chemistry, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Roland Winter

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Chalikian, T.V., Macgregor, R.B. (2023). The Effect of Pressure on the Conformational Stability of DNA. In: Sugimoto, N. (eds) Handbook of Chemical Biology of Nucleic Acids. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9776-1_3

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