J Am Chem Soc. 2009 Sep 2;131(34):12088-90. doi: 10.1021/ja900228j.

Strand invasion of extended, mixed-sequence B-DNA by gammaPNAs.

He G¹, Rapireddy S, Bahal R, Sahu B, Ly DH.

Author information

1: Department of Chemistry and Center for Nucleic Acids Science and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, 4400 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.

Abstract

In this communication, we show that peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) with lengths of 15-20 nucleotides, when preorganized into a right-handed helix, can invade mixed-sequence double-helical B-form DNA (B-DNA). Strand invasion occurs in a highly sequence-specific manner through direct Watson-Crick base pairing. Unlike the previously developed double-duplex invasion strategy, which requires simultaneous binding of two strands of pseudocomplementary PNAs to DNA, only a single strand of gammaPNA is required for invasion in this case, and no nucleobase substitution is needed.