Meet GNA - DNA’s ‘ambidextrous’ cousin
May 4, 2008 by Elaine
Filed under DNA, General Genetics and Health, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology
GNA
(Source: John Chaput, University of Arizona)
Nanotechnology researchers are continually on the lookout for new building blocks to push innovation and discovery to scales much smaller than the tiniest speck of dust. At present DNA nanotechnology researchers are basically limited by what they can buy off the shelf.
In the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, researchers led by John Chaput, are building synthetic molecules that assemble like DNA, but have additional properties not found in natural DNA. It’s called GNA. In the case of GNA, the sugar is the only difference with DNA. The five carbon sugar commonly found in DNA, called deoxyribose, is substituted by glycerol, which contains just three carbon atoms.
In nature, many molecules important to life like DNA and proteins, have evolved to exist only as right-handed. The GNA structures, unlike DNA, turn out to be ‘enantiomeric’ molecules, which in chemical terms means both left and right-handed. The ability to make mirror image structures opens up new possibilities for making nanostructures. The research team also found a number of physical and chemical properties that were unique to GNA, including having a higher tolerance to heat than DNA nanostructures.
Now, with a new material in hand, which John Chaput dubs ‘unnatural nucleic acid nanostructures,’ the group hopes to explore the limits on the topology and types of structure they can make.
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/2008/130/i18/abs/ja800079j.html
Elaine Warburton www.geneticsandhealth.com
