Macromolecular crowding effects on the kinetics and thermodynamics of nucleic acids

The intracellular environment is an example of a crowded environment: one in which macromolecules occupy 20–30% of the total volume. In our research, we explore the effects of crowding on nucleic acid stability and dynamics. We demonstrate that crowding can mediate differential stabilization of a complementary DNA duplex over a duplex containing a single base mismatch. In addition, we show that contrary to simple viscosity effects, the rate of hybridization of DNA increases in the presence of crowding agents. The effects of crowding on systems containing RNA is also investigated.