Functional replacement of a protein-induced bend in a DNA recombination site

IN recent years the capacity of proteins to bend DNA by binding to specific sites has become a widely appreciated phenomenon1–7. In many cases, the protein-DNA interaction is known to be functionally significant because destruction of the DNA site or the protein itself results in an altered phenotype. An important question to be answered in these cases is whether bending of DNA is important per se or is merely a consequence of the way a...