Duplex dissociation of telomere DNAs induced by molecular crowding

Because of the importance of telomere DNAs, the structures of these DNAs in vivo are currently of great research interest in the medical, pharmaceutical, chemical, and industrial fields. To understand the structure of biomolecules in vivo, their properties studied in vitro are extrapolated to the in vivo condition, while the condition in a living cell is inherently molecularly crowded and a nonideal solution contains various biomolecules. We investigated the effect of molecular crowding, which is one of the most important cellular environmental conditions, on the structure and stability of the telomere and G-rich and C-rich DNAs using circular dichroism (CD) spectra, CD melting curves, and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC). The CD spectra and CD melting curves of G-rich DNA, C-rich DNA, and the 1:1 mixture of G-rich and C-rich DNAs showed that each G-rich DNA, C-rich DNA, and the 1:1 mixture form the antiparallel G-quadruplex, I-motif, and duplex, respectively, in the noncrowding condition as previously considered. On the contrary, the G-rich and C-rich DNAs individually form the parallel G-quadruplex and I-motif, respectively, in the molecular crowding condition, and the 1:1 mixture folds into the parallel G-quadruplex and I-motif but does not form a duplex. The ITC measurements indicated that the thermodynamic stability (DeltaG degrees (20)) of the duplex formation between the G-rich and C-rich DNAs in the noncrowding condition was -10.2 kcal mol(-)(1), while only a small heat change was observed in the ITC measurements in the molecular crowding condition. These ITC results also demonstrated that the molecular crowding condition prevents any duplex formation between G-rich and C-rich DNAs. These results indicate that a structural polymorphism of the telomere DNAs is induced by molecular crowding in vivo.