Answer to Question #286418 in Molecular Biology for Oliver Tzetch

Question

From a hospital patient afflicted with a mysterious illness, you isolate and culture and

then purify DNA from the culture. You find that the DNA sample obtained from the

culture contains two different kinds of DNA; one was labeled as double-stranded

human DNA and the other was labeled as single stranded viral DNA. However, a

mix-up occurred and the labels were accidentally removed from the test tubes. How

can you figure out which test tube contains which DNA, if you only have access to

the nucleotides in each sample?

Answer 1

With nucleotides in each sample, double stranded human DNA is linear and has filamentous form in the test tube while single stranded viral DNA is stellate or star shaped.

They also have different ranges of tunnel lengths and tunnel curvatures.