At Last, My Thesis is Published!

The results of my doctoral dissertation have been published in Nucleic Acids Research, at long last!

You’ve probably been wondering for months about the images in the right column of this blog. My doctoral dissertation described the effects of torsional stress on the structure of DNA. It is well known that DNA is slightly underwound inside the cell, but it’s not known why. I attacked this problem using some of the largest supercomputers in the country to simulate 19 underwound and overwound DNA helices in water. What I found is that even slight underwinding causes base pairs (the rungs of the DNA ladder) to flip out, away from the double helix. What’s more, this structural “failure” was more common in some DNA sequences than in others. This lead us to speculate that proteins might recognize specific DNA sequences because those sequences are more likely to fail when underwound. I hope I’ll live long enough to see if my hunch was right.

You can read more about it here and here.

If you want to see some cool movies of torqued DNA, click here (and scroll down to “DNA Twisting Animations”).

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Tagged as: baylor college of medicine, biotechnology, dna, science