Ionic Mobilities of Duplex and Frayed Wire DNA in Discontinuous Buffer Electrophoresis: Evidence of Interactions with Amino Acids †

Nucleic acid-amino acid interactions are fundamental to understanding higher-order interactions made by nucleic acid-binding proteins. Here we employ electrophoresis to investigate DNA-amino acid interactions by using a set of amino acids (Ala, Gln, Gly, Met, Phe, Val, bicine and tricine) as trailing ions in a discontinuous buffer, and monitoring their interactions with duplex (from 12 to 3000 bp) and frayed wire [a set of self-assembled …