The Role of Deoxyribonucleic Acid in Ribonucleic Acid Synthesis

Abstract

The base composition of RNA produced in the reaction was shown to be dependent upon the base composition of DNA used to prime the system. The present communication is a further report on the role of DNA in this reaction. We have now shown that under a variety of conditions, with various DNA preparations as primers, RNA formed appears to be a complementary copy of DNA and that both strands of DNA are copied. The amount of RNA formed may exceed the amount of DNA added, which suggests a catalytic role for DNA in RNA production. There are many striking similarities between the enzymatic synthesis of RNA and that of DNA4 (13)) but one important difference between these two reactions concerns the nature of the priming DNA. Thus DNA polymerase from both animal and bacterial sources is poorly active with preparations of native DNA (14, 15). RNA polymerase, however, is primed by either native DNA or denatured DNA. In contrast to DNA poly- merase, RNA polymerase is primed to a lesser extent by de- natured DNA. These results are presented below.