Naoki Sugimoto
Konan University, Japan
Title: Functions of nucleic acids with non-canonical structures
Biography
Biography: Naoki Sugimoto
Abstract
Water is the major solvent component in living cells, and the properties of water in the highly crowded media inside cells differ from that in buffered solution. As it is difficult to measure the thermodynamic behavior of nucleic acids in cells directly and quantitatively, we recently developed a cell-mimicking system using cosolutes as crowding reagents. In this presentation, I will show how the structures and thermodynamic properties of nucleic acids differ under various conditions such as highly crowded environments and discuss the major determinants of the crowding effects on nucleic acids. The effects of molecular crowding on non-canonical structures of DNA and RNA such as quadruplexes that play important roles in transcription and translation are also discussed.
