Formation study of toroidal condensation of DNA

A detailed study of the formation of toroidal condensation produced from the 2700 base pair fragments of plasmid PUC13 DNA, induced by metal ions, is introduced. We have extracted several typical intermediate structures based on investigation by electron microscopy, and compared their size distributions. The observations suggest that the formation process of DNA condensation is the process of folding and arranging DNA chains and that of disorder-order transition. The result also indicates that the condensed particles are polymeric, but not randomly aggregative, further proving the toroidal structures are formed in certain regularities.