Single-molecule kinetic locking allows fluorescence-free quantification of protein/nucleic-acid binding

Abstract

Rieu et al. present a magnetic tweezers based single-molecule manipulation method, called kinetic locking, for direct detection of biomolecular binding without use of fluorescent probes. By measuring dynamical interactions of E. coli RecQ helicase with its DNA substrate, authors show that this method holds promise for studying DNA-DNA and DNA-protein interactions while avoiding the need for labelling.