Schematic representation of the components of bacteriophage φ29 during packaging of genomic dsDNA ()

<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "Affinity of molecular interactions in the bacteriophage φ29 DNA packaging motor"</p><p>Nucleic Acids Research 2006;34(9):2698-2709.</p><p>Published online 19 May 2006</p><p>PMCID:PMC1464111.</p><p>© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved</p> The predicted secondary structure of φ29 pRNA sequences used in this study (), as calculated by MFold (,). 120pRNA is a 120mer that retains full φ29 genomic dsDNA packaging activity, but is shorter than the wild-type φ29 174mer pRNA. Complementary bases in the CE and D loops implicated in pRNA multimerization are in bold. 71pRNA is a shortened version of 120pRNA, with identical loop structure, whilst 71F6pRNA is modified to remove base pairing between CE and D loops. Neither 71pRNA nor 71F6pRNA are competent to package φ29 genomic dsDNA. The CEpRNA region, used in the SMPB experiments in this study, is a truncated non-multimerizing variant. TEM analysis of C-His gp10 () indicates assembly into structures with dimensions and appearance similar to previously published data for the wild-type protein. Size bar = 40 nm