Talk:DNA

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Ideas for improvement

This "figure-review" was written by Julia A. Urawski as part of an assignment for a Biochemistry course at Westfield State University, and posted by the instructor with permission.

  1. My favorite figure: Figure “Guanine-Cytosine”. The coordinates are at http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/Image:B-DNA.pdb and the script is "http:/wiki/scripts/User:Adithya_Sagar/Workbench_newDNA/B-dna/15.spt". The primary citation is from 1981, and available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6941276. This figure is based on “The Structure of B-DNA in Oriented Fibers” – J Biomol Structure Dynamics. Also available is a secondary source from a 2002 biochemistry textbook. This citation is available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22386/.
  2. This is my suggestion for a figure legend: Base pairing guanine-cytosine involves 3 hydrogen bonds. Guanine is a purine and cytosine is a pyrimidine. The two nucleotides are shown with a background of surrounding DNA from the same molecule.
  3. What I like about the figure: Although this figure may look simple compared to some of the others that I could have selected, I understand the importance of guanine-cytosine bonding in DNA (apart from the fact that those two bases are there to code for amino acids). The higher the G-C content of DNA, the more stable the DNA is – an A-T interaction only has two hydrogen bonds each, as opposed to the three hydrogen bonds of a G-C interaction.
  4. Corresponding figure in the primary citation: I could not find the corresponding figure in the primary citation. I know that the figure is related to the Drew-Dickerson Dodecamer models of DNA. The guanine-cytosine base pair is shown in Figure 5.12 “Structures of the Base Pairs Proposed by Watson and Crick” in the Biochemistry textbook by Berg et al.
  5. How I think the figure could be improved: I think that this figure would be even easier for me to use if the three hydrogen bonds were shown in distance between atoms (so I do not have to measure them every time). Also, the background could be a little less visible (perhaps a quick option to remove the two extra nucleotide pairs if we only want to focus on the main pair).

References

Drew, H R, et al. “Structure of a B-DNA Dodecamer: Conformation and Dynamics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Apr. 1981. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6941276


Berg, J.M., Tymoczko, J.L., Stryer, L. Biochemistry. 5th edition. New York: W H Freeman; 2002. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21154/

--Karsten Theis 18:50, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

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Karsten Theis

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