DNA Thermometers

Does a person’s constant body temperature of 37 degrees C mean that temperature remains constant with the body’s cells? For some time, cell biologists have suspected that internal temperature variations not only exist but play a role in such things as the coiling/uncoiling of DNA in gene expression and in the folding and unfolding of cellular proteins. The answer to this observation had to await a means for measuring the temperature change, which researchers at the University of Montreal may now have found, with a 5 nm strand of DNA and fluorescent reporters. MORE

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