Guanine radical chemistry reveals the effect of thermal fluctuations in gene promoter regions

DNA is not the static entity that structural pictures suggest. It has been longly known that it ‘breathes’ and fluctuates by local opening of the bases. Here we show that the effect of structural fluctuations, exhibited by AT-rich low stability regions present in some common transcription initiation regions, influences the properties of DNA in a distant range of at least 10 bp. This observation is confirmed by experiments on genuine gene promoter regions of DNA. The spatial correlations revealed by these experiments throw a new light on the physics of DNA and could have biological implications, for instance by contributing to the cooperative effects needed to assemble the molecular machinery that forms the transcription complex.