PNA Bases

PNA Bases

Creative Peptides offers high quality PNA bases for a variety of scientific applications.

Browse our catalog below to find your products of interest.

Introduction

Background

PNA is one of the new nucleic acid derivatives that attracted great attention. It was designed and synthesized in 1991 by biochemist Nielsen and organic chemist Borchardt et al. They replaced the negatively charged ribose-phosphate backbone in nucleic acid molecules with an uncharged N-(2-aminoethyl) glycine-based polyamide backbone and attached different bases (purines and pyrimidines) to the polyamide backbone with methylene carbonyl bonds. Compared with nucleic acid molecules, PNAs are stable over a wider temperature and pH range, are not degraded by enzymes in cells, and are more susceptible to mispairing during base pairing; chain-like structures are more stable than the corresponding DNA/RNA double-stranded structures, and their stability is independent of cations.

PNA Bases

Similar to the basic structure of DNA/RNA, PNA bases contain several traditional bases (A, T/U, C and G), which are composed through the methylene carbonyl bonds and amide backbones, respectively. The nucleic acid bases (ATCG) of PNA are attached to the backbone by methylene carbonyl bonds rather than the usual deoxyribose (DNA) or ribose (RNA).

Fig. 1 Backbone of PNA bases

The main differences between these bases include two aspects:

• Types of protecting groups used to protect the primary amine of the backbone structure and the exocyclic amino group of bases
• The modification method of the amide backbone structure.

PNA containing all four natural nucleobases hybridizes to complementary oligonucleotides obeying the Watson–Crick base-pairing rules.

Application

• Antisense and Antigene Technology
• Genomic site-directed cleavage and DNA mapping analysis
• Hybridization probes
• Probes for gene cloning and mutation detection

References

• Ray A; et al. Peptide nucleic acid (PNA): its medical and biotechnical applications and promise for the future. FASEB J. 2000 Jun; 14(9): 1041-60.
• Egholm M; et al. PNA hybridizes to complementary oligonucleotides obeying the Watson-Crick hydrogen-bonding rules. Nature. 1993 Oct 7; 365(6446): 566-8.
• Egholm M; et al. Recognition of guanine and adenine in DNA by cytosine and thymine containing peptide nucleic acids (PNA). J.am.chem.soc. 1992, 114(24): 9677-9678.
• Egholm M; et al. Peptide nucleic acids (PNA). Oligonucleotide analogs with an achiral peptide backbone. Journal of the American Chemical Society. 1992, 114(5): 1895-1897.
• Nielsen; et al. Sequence-selective recognition of DNA by strand displacement with a thymine-substituted polyamide. Science.1991.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.