Dr. Primož Šket was awarded the Goethe-BMRZ Poster Prize!

At the international NMR conference Euromar 2011 "Magnetic Resonance Conference", with around one thousand participants and almost six hundred poster presentations, which was held between 21^st and 25^th of August 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany, Dr. Primož Šket received one of the Goethe-BMRZ Poster Prizes for his poster contribution entitled "Tetramolecular G-quadruplexes in solution: new insights". G-quadruplexes are higher order secondary structures formed by guanine-rich nucleic acid stretches in the presence of cations. G-rich segments are found in biologically significant regions of the genome such as telomeres, and promoter regions of eukaryotic cells. Sequence details and the nature of metal ions play a major role in formation and stabilization as well as structural diversity of G-quadruplexes. Early NMR spectroscopic studies, which were performed almost twenty years ago revealed that d(TG₄T) in the presence of Na⁺ ions forms a tetramolecular G-quadruplex consisting of four G-quartets with all guanine residues in anti conformation. We herein report on undescribed minor form, which is in slow exchange with the known topology. An additional aspect of the study involves the evaluation of dynamics of cation movement in tetramolecular quadruplexes.