"Is macromolecular crowding overlooked?"--Effects of volume exclusion on DNA-amino acids complexes and their...

Biological macromolecules evolve and function within intracellular environments that are crowded with other macromolecules. Crowding results in surprisingly large quantitative effects on both the rates and the equilibria of interactions involving macromolecules, but such interactions are commonly studied outside the cell in uncrowded buffers. The addition of high concentrations of natural and synthetic macromolecules to such buffers enables crowding to be mimicked in vitro, and should be encouraged as a routine variable to study. In this study, we propose to understand the changes in DNA character and its modulation in presence of macromolecules such as PEG with reference to binding parameters to amino acids using fluorescence enhancement.