Abstract: | A personal computer program to visualize and compare the property of double-stranded DNA surface has been developed. Comparison of the surface property between Watson-Crick base-pairs in B-form DNA has elucidated that the base-pair replacement between a "degenerated base-pairs" conserves the pattern of potential hydrogen-bonding sites in both major and minor grooves. The idea of the "degenerated base-pairs" was applied for the problem of the base-sequence variation from the consensus sequence in the -35 region of E. coli promoter. The sequence variation is found to have tendency to occur among the degenerated base-pairs. |