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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Measuring In Vitro ATPase Activity for Enzymatic Characterization
Published on: August 23, 2016
Why does RecA protein hydrolyse ATP?
1Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53706.
Abstract:
RecA is a DNA-dependent ATPase involved in DNA-strand repair. Most of the ATP hydrolysis that occurs in a RecA nucleoprotein filament is implicitly considered to be irrelevant in many current models for RecA-mediated DNA-strand exchange. However, preventing RecA from hydrolysing ATP alters its behavior, suggesting that ATP hydrolysis by RecA is more than incidental. This review explores recent results detailing the effects and rates of ATP hydrolysis by RecA, and models are proposed that permit us to account quantitatively for ATP consumption by this protein.
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