Oligonucleotide interactions. III. Circular dichroism studies of the conformation of deoxyoligonucleolides

Abstract

The circular dichroism (CD) spectra of the four usual deoxymononucleosides, all sixteen deoxydinucleotides, and a number of trinucleotides have been measured. The dimer spectra are quite different from the sum of the spectra of their constituent monomers. This indicates the presence of base‐stacked conformations analogous to those found for ribonucleoside diphosphates. The CD spectra of several deoxytrinucleotide diphosphates and single‐strand f 1 DNA can be calculated fairly well by using a semi‐empirical nearest‐neighbor approach. There is little or no effect of terminal phosphate or of salt concentration on the optical properties of most deoxy oligomers. The possibility of simultaneous analysis of mixtures of deoxypurine or deoxypyrimidine sequence isomers has been examined. This seems to be a viable approach for the analysis of purine runs but cannot promise much success for pyrimidine runs.