Self-catalytic activity found in genomic DNA

Catalytic activity has beenfound for the first time in a natural DNA sequence. The self-catalytic activity shows "that DNA is not merely the inert information tape for storing hereditary information, as has been thought for half a century, but that it also has the intrinsic capacity to modify itself," says Jacques R. Fresco of Princeton University, who made the discovery with coworkers Olga A. Amosova and Richard Coulter (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2006, 103, 4392). Sidney Altman of Yale University and Thomas R. Cech of Howard Hughes Medical Institute discovered catalytic RNA, work for which they shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And catalytic activity has been identified in synthetic DNA, such as in DNA oligomers created in in vitro evolution experiments. Now, the Princeton group has discovered self-catalyzed guanine-depurinating activity in short natural DNA sequences as well. These sequences are widely distributed in human and other genomes, suggesting that self-catalyzed depurination of guanine may play a key biological role.