ABSTRACT
The development of nanotechnologies requires understanding of fundamental principles of miniaturization or compaction that are realized in natural nanosystems. Nucleosome is a remarkable example of such a nanosystem. We overview briefly the features of the nucleosome structure and highlight the aspects that are of importance for understanding the nucleosome formation and self-assembly. We also present the results of our investigation describing the frequencies, the sequence specificity, and features of distributions of classical and alternative conformations of the sugar-phosphate backbone in the nucleosomal DNA for clarification of the role of such transitions in adjustment of the double-helical DNA structure for the nucleosome formation and the recognition of the nucleosomal DNA by non-histone proteins.
