What is it about?
We reviewed the general principles guiding past and present uses of salt gradient AUC for exploring genomic DNA, and discuss open problems of AUC/CsCl inference that should become tractable with the aid of a few more entirely sequenced vertebrate genomes.
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Why is it important?
Analyses of absorbance profiles of DNA in CsCl density gradients at sedimentation equilibrium, obtained by analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC), played an important role in molecular genetics and genomics during almost half a century (1957–2004). They allowed accurate calculations of GC (base composition) distributions, GC mosaicism and gene densities in vertebrate genomes that have now been amply confirmed via completed sequences, including those of human, mouse, and pufferfish.
Perspectives
In further analyses by this laboratory, it was shown that the molecular profile obtained by analytical ultracentrifugation is very similar to that of sequences for frequency distributions of fragments in the same range. This observation has enabled, by extention, to infer about satellite DNA, which is generally a challenge by high throughput sequencing and also about isochore distribution and compositional correlation by FISH with Giemsa banding.
Nicolas Carels
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation
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This page is a summary of: Using Analytical Ultracentrifugation of DNA in CsCl Gradients to Explore Large-Scale Properties of Genomes, December 2005, Royal Society of Chemistry,
DOI: 10.1039/9781847552617-00104.
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