Although it is not widely-known, the strands of circular duplex plasmid and viral chromosomes have been non-destructively separated, and the separated strands have been reconstituted to yield a new duplex structure with all the properties of the native chromosome restored. This suggests a paranemic structure for the DNA, that is, a structure whose strands are not topologically linked by plectonemic (i.e., Watson-Crick) twists. The reason that these phenomena are largely unknown to the general

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... ientific public is that they were either published in obscure journals, or not published at all. Moreover, the methods employed to obtain these results were very difficult, time-consuming and expensive, wherefore they are not likely to be repeated anytime soon. Since these phenomena would be of great interest to the general scientific public, the experiments therefore need to be repeated, but in a way that is easy, fast and inexpensive to perform, so that the results may be readily reproduced in other laboratories. Two such experiments are described herein.