 I. G. Panyutin

I. G. Panyutin studied the physical chemistry of DNA strand exchange. In 1994, work with P. Hsieh measured spontaneous branch migration, the motion of an exchange junction along homologous double-stranded DNA.^[ref]

The experiments varied temperature and ions while using defined DNA substrates. Removing magnesium accelerated the reported process by roughly a thousandfold. The comparison illustrates why an observed reaction rate is not a property of the DNA sequence alone: solution conditions can alter junction geometry and therefore how readily exchange proceeds.^[ref]