Probing DNA helicase kinetics with temperature-controlled magnetic tweezers.

ABSTRACT: Motor protein functions like adenosine triphosphate (ATP) hydrolysis or translocation along molecular substrates take place at nanometric scales and consequently depend on the amount of available thermal energy. The associated rates can hence be investigated by actively varying the temperature conditions. In this article, a thermally controlled magnetic tweezers (MT) system for single-molecule experiments at up to 40 °C is presented. Its compact thermostat module yields a precision of 0.1 °C and can in principle be tailored to any other surface-coupled microscopy technique, such as tethered particle motion (TPM), nanopore-based sensing of biomolecules, or super-resolution fluorescence imaging. The instrument is used to examine the temperature dependence of translocation along double-strand

SUBMITTER: Gollnick B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4473356 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature