Fig. 1: Peptide/RNA coacervates exhibit higher robustness than peptide/DNA coacervates.
a Salt stability of peptide/peptide and oligonucleotide/peptide coacervates. Critical salt concentrations (CSCs) were measured through turbidity measurements of peptide/peptide and oligonucleotide/peptide solutions by titration with NaCl in 25 mM HEPES, pH 7.5 and at room temperature. In all experiments, the anion concentration was kept constant ([nt] = 5 mM and [glutamic acid] = 10 mM). b Turbidity curves for R4/DNA8 and R4/RNA8 as a function of nucleotide concentration. The dotted lines are tangents to the inflection point, used to determine the minimal concentration required for coacervation (indicated in the graph). c Thermal stability of R4 coacervates with DNA8 and RNA8. 1% Cy3-(TGAC)2 was used for visualization. Scale bars are 10 µm. d Estimation of the minimal peptide length (Nmin) required for coacervation for a given nucleic acid composition. R2 values for the linear fit: 0.96 (DNA8), 0.89 (HNA8) and 0.99 (RNA8). R = Arginine, E = Glutamic acid, nt = nucleotide, DNA8 = 8-deoxyribonucleotide-long mixed-sequence oligonucleotide ((ACTG)2), RNA8 = 8-ribonucleotide-long mixed-sequence oligonucleotide ((ACUG)2), HNA8 = 8-nucleotide-long mixed-sequence oligonucleotide comprising deoxyribonucleotides and ribonucleotides (ArCrUGArCrUG). n = 3 for data in (a); mean and SD values are provided. CSC values in (a) can be found in Supplementary Table S4; values in (d) can be found in Supplementary Table S3. Parameters from the linear fit in (d) are in Supplementary Table S6. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
