{"id":213682,"date":"2025-05-09T21:12:34","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T02:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/a-more-realistic-look-at-dna-in-action-study-shows-it-behaves-differently-when-crowded-by-molecules"},"modified":"2025-05-09T21:12:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T02:12:34","slug":"a-more-realistic-look-at-dna-in-action-study-shows-it-behaves-differently-when-crowded-by-molecules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/a-more-realistic-look-at-dna-in-action-study-shows-it-behaves-differently-when-crowded-by-molecules","title":{"rendered":"A more realistic look at DNA in action: Study shows it behaves differently when crowded by molecules"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-more-realistic-look-at-dna-in-action-study-shows-it-behaves-differently-when-crowded-by-molecules2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Most biochemistry labs that study DNA isolate it within a water-based solution that allows scientists to manipulate DNA without interacting with other molecules. They also tend to use heat to separate strands, heating the DNA to more than 150\u00b0F, a temperature a cell would never naturally reach. By contrast, in a living cell DNA lives in a very crowded environment, and special proteins attach to DNA to mechanically unwind the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/double+helix\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">double helix<\/a> and then pry it apart.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe interior of the cell is super crowded with molecules, and most biochemistry experiments are super uncrowded,\u201d said Northwestern professor John Marko. \u201cYou can think of extra molecules as billiard balls. They\u2019re pounding against the DNA double helix and keeping it from opening.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most biochemistry labs that study DNA isolate it within a water-based solution that allows scientists to manipulate DNA without interacting with other molecules. They also tend to use heat to separate strands, heating the DNA to more than 150\u00b0F, a temperature a cell would never naturally reach. By contrast, in a living cell DNA lives [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}