Four-Stranded DNA Makes Human Debut

Contrary to biological dogma, it appears human DNA can sometimes form a quadruple helix.

By Breanna Draxler
Jan 27, 2014 12:00 AMOct 25, 2019 3:48 PM
Four-Stranded DNA Makes Human Debut
This top view of a G-quadruplex shows its structure in the DNA of a human telomere, where they frequently form. Thomas Splettstoesser/Wikimedia Commons

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In describing the two-stranded structure of DNA, Cambridge University biologists James Watson and Francis Crick gave us the image of a twisting ladder they called a double helix. The rungs were connected by pairs of chemical bases called nucleotides: Adenine (A) paired with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) with guanine (G). 

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