GENOME STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION ANALYSIS OF THE NUCLEOSOME POTENTIAL OF DNA SEQUENCES GENERATED BY SELEX-EXPERIMENTS AND POSSESSING BY THE LOW AND HIGH AFFINITY TO HISTONE OCTAMER

Motivation: Nucleosome packaging of genome DNA makes an integral part necessary for DNA functioning in vivo. Previously, we have designed the software program for calculating nucleosome potential for a nucleotide sequence, which is a quantitative characteristics reflecting an ability of DNA to pack into a nucleosome (Levitsky et al., 2001). For testing this program, it is important to study its ability to recognize DNA regions with high or low affinity to histone octamer within the samples of DNA sequences obtained experimentally. Results: We have performed an analysis of two obtained by SELEX-experiments sets of DNA sequences with different potential to form a nucleosome. As shown, the program for calculating nucleosome potential gives proper classification of nucleotide sequences possessing by high or low affinity to histone octamer. This means that nucleosome potential value characterizes the affinity of the core histones to the DNA region under study. Availability: The program for recognition of nucleosome sites is a part of the GeneExpress system, the section DN