For those interested, I bundled all the RecA blog postings into one single essay that can be found here.

[Update: Not surprisingly, RecA is a motor protein : "Additional biophysical and biochemical analyses revealed that RecA family proteins may couple ATP binding and hydrolysis to the DNA strand exchange reaction in a manner that promotes clockwise axial rotation of nucleoprotein filaments. Specially, the 61 RadA helical filament undergoes clockwise axial rotation in 2 discrete 120° steps to the 31 extended right-handed filament and then to the 43 left-handed filament. As a result, all the DNA-binding motifs (denoted L1, L2 and HhH) in the RadA proteins move concurrently to mediate DNA binding, homology pairing, and strand exchange, respectively. Therefore, the energy of ATP is used to rotate not only DNA substrates but also the RecA family protein filaments." ]

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