LONG-DISTANCE relationships really mess up your life, and they don’t do much
for your biochemistry either. We used to think communication between molecules
in solution was impossible unless they were almost close enough to bump into
each other. But in fact, a strand of DNA can provoke a reaction in another
strand far away—a finding that reveals biochemistry as fiendishly
complex.
Ions seem to act as the go-between, say Kenneth Breslauer from Rutgers
University in New Jersey and his colleagues at the University of Cape Town.
Breslauer’s team studied a strand of DNA that would fold up in an alkaline…
