#Id: 3998
#Unit 2. Cellular Organization
One approach is to measure the effect of nicking the DNA. Unconstrained supercoils are released by nicking, whereas constrained supercoils are unaffected. Nicking releases -50% of the overall supercoiling.
Another approach uses the crosslinking reagent psoralen, which binds more readily to DNA when it is under torsional tension. The reaction of psoralen with E. coli DNA in vivo corresponds to an average density of 1 negative super helical turn/200 bp (sigma = -0.05).