Dual - beam optical tweezers experiments subject single molecules of DNA to high forces (~ 300 pN) with 0.1
pN accuracy, probing the energy and specificity of nucleic acid - ligand structures. Stretching phage λ-DNA reveals an
increase in the applied force up to a critical force known as the overstretching transition. In this region, base pairing and
stacking are disrupted as double stranded DNA (dsDNA) is melted. Proteins that bind to the double strand will tend to
stabilize dsDNA, and melting will occur at higher forces. Proteins that bind to single stranded DNA (ssDNA) destabilize
melting, provided that the rate of association is comparable to the pulling rate of the experiment. Many proteins,
however, exhibit some affinity for both dsDNA and ssDNA. We describe experiments upon DNA + HMGB2 (box A), a
nuclear protein that is believed to facilitate transcription. By characterizing changes in the structure of dsDNA with a
polymer model of elasticity, we have determined the equilibrium association constant for HMGB2 to be Kds = 0.15 ± 0.7
109 M-1 for dsDNA binding. Analysis of the melting transition reveals an equilibrium association constant for HMGB2
to ssDNA to be Kss = 0.039 ± 0.019 109 M-1 for ssDNA binding.
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