Hydrogen bonding in nucleic acid bases

Buskov VI, Bushnev VN, Poltev VI (1980) Nuclear magnetic resonance study of C-H—O hydrogen bonds in nucleic acid base analogs. Mol Biol (USSR) 14 245-250 (in English)... 

Turner DH, Sugimoto N, Kierzek R, Dreiker SD. Free energy increments for hydrogen bonds in nucleic acid base pairs. J. Am. 

In all these events, the hydrogen-bonded Watson-Crick base pair is operative and is responsible for DNA reduplication, transcription, and translation. Since mispairing can occur, all these processes are checked for fidelity by several enzymes which can correct for errors [6521. At this and all other levels of DNA reduplication and protein biosynthesis, intermolecular hydrogen bonds between nucleic acids and between nucleic acids and proteins are responsible for recognition, interaction, and, finally, for information transfer. 

In related work, Riley and Hobza have provided an assessment of the MP2 method in conjunction with several medium and extended basis sets in the study of various hydrogen bonded and dispersion bound complexes of biological relevance. They report that the MP2/cc-pVTZ method supports the most well balanced description of noncovalent interactions. However, the MP2 method does not provide reliable results for the cyclic hydrogen bonds found in nucleic acid base pairs in combination with any of the basis sets considered by these authors. 

Poly A form a complex with a 4 1 stoichiometry. The apparent hypochromicities of various mixtures are listed in Table 4. The mixtures of A12 with Poly U and of T12 with Poly A showed large hypochromicities compared with other mixtures, which suggests the importance of the hydrogen-bonding formation between complementary nucleic acid bases such as A-U and T-A. 

Hardman SJO, Thompson KC (2006) Influence of base stacking and hydrogen bonding on the fluorescence of 2-aminopurine and pyrrolocytosine in nucleic acids. Biochem 45 9145-9155... 

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