Determination of the nucleotide composition of a deoxyribonucleic acid by high-performance liquid chromatography of its enzymatic hydrlysate: a review

Abstract The guanine-plus-cytosine content of DNA is one of the most important criteria for classification of microorganisms. Usually the G + C content is estimated by the melting temperature of the DNA. Although a number of high-performance liquid chromatography system for analyzing nucleic acid derivatives are known, their application for the G + C assay has not been widely utilized. This review covers recent work in which DNA is digested by purified enzyme(s) to form nucleotides or nucleosides, which are analyzed by HPLC. The new methods are practical and sufficiently reliable for the determination of DNA based composition.