Although it is not widely-known,
the strands of circular duplex plasmid and viral chromosomes have been
non-destructively separated, and the separated strands have been reconstituted
to yield a new duplex structure with all the properties of the native chromosome
restored. This suggests a paranemic structure for the DNA, that is, a
structure whose strands are not topologically linked by plectonemic (i.e.,Watson-Crick) twists. The
reason that these phenomena are largely unknown to the general scientific public
is that they were either published in obscure journals, or not published at
all. Moreover, the methods employed to obtain these results were very
difficult, time-consuming and expensive, wherefore they are not likely to be
repeated anytime soon. Since these phenomena would be of great interest to the
general scientific public, the experiments therefore need to be repeated, but
in a way that is easy, fast and inexpensive to perform, so that the results may
be readily reproduced in other laboratories. Two such experiments are described
herein.
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