Nucleic acids base sequence

Base pair (bp) The four nucleotides in the DNA contain the bases adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Two bases (adenine and thymine or guanine and cytosine) are held together by weak bonds to form base pairs. The two strands of human DNA are held together in the shape of a double helix by those bonds between base pairs. For example, the complementary nucleic acid base sequence to G-T-A-C that forms a double-stranded structure with the matching bases is C-A-T-G. 

Walter Gilbert United States nucleic acid base sequences... 

In polymeric nucleic acids, the Watson-Crick base pairs also have the potential to form additional hydrogen bonds. These will generally be saturated by water of hydration molecules. They are, in fact, necessary for specific recognition of a particular nucleic acid base sequence by a particular protein such as, for example,... 

Chapter 19 provides an overview of protein synthesis. The chapter begins with a discussion of the genetic code, the mechanism by which nucleic acid base sequences specify the amino acid sequences of polypeptides. This is followed by discussions of protein synthesis as it occurs in both prokaryotes and eukary-KEY CONCEPTS 1 9.1 otes and a description of the mechanisms that convert polypeptides into their... 

Two other types of molecular database are pertinent to drug discovery. One is the so-called reaction database. It is a 2D database containing the reagents, products, and conditions of chemical reactions. The medicinal chemist would use one of these databases as a resource to find synthetic procedures. Another type of molecular database used in pharmaceutical and biotechnology research contains peptide sequences of proteins and nucleic acid base sequences of DNA and RNA. These sequence databases are essential in biotechnology and genomics, which have their role in modem dmg discovery. 

Nucleic acid based sequence (RFLP) YHV, IMNV, GAV,... 

RNAi technology has obvious therapeutic potential as an antisense agent, and initial therapeutic targets of RNAi include viral infection, neurological diseases and cancer therapy. The synthesis of dsRNA displaying the desired nucleotide sequence is straightforward. However, as in the case of additional nucleic-acid-based therapeutic approaches, major technical hurdles remain to be overcome before RNAi becomes a therapeutic reality. Naked unmodified siRNAs for example display a serum half-life of less than 1 min, due to serum nuclease degradation. Approaches to improve the RNAi pharmacokinetic profile include chemical modification of the nucleotide backbone, to render it nuclease resistant, and the use of viral or non-viral vectors, to achieve safe product delivery to cells. As such, the jury remains out in terms of the development and approval of RNAi-based medicines, in the short to medium term at least. 

The investigations directed at the synthesis of thymine-substituted polymers demonstrate that the type of functional groups displayed by nucleic acid bases are compatible with ROMP. Moreover, the application of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry to the analysis of these polymers adds to the battery of tools available for the characterization of ROMP and its products. The utility of this approach for the creation of molecules with the desired biological properties, however, is still undetermined. It is unknown whether these thymine-substituted polymers can hybridize with nucleic acids. Moreover, ROMP does not provide a simple solution to the controlled synthesis of materials that display specific sequences composed of all five common nucleic acid bases. Nevertheless, the demonstration that metathesis reactions can be conducted with such substrates suggests that perhaps neobiopolymers that function as nucleic acid analogs can be synthesized by such processes. 

Nucleic acid-based technologies Nucleic acid probe Polymerase chain reaction, DNA amplication 16S rRNA sequencing techniques automated riboprinting... 

The way in which the coding strand of DNA specifies the sequence of amino acids in a protein is known as the genetic code. The code is made up of triplets of nucleic acid bases, known as codons. A given series of three bases in the coding strand DNA of a gene will unambiguously specify a particular amino acid and no other. 

To avoid too fast an energy transfer and enhance the selectivity of the laser excitation of the chosen sites in large biomolecules, it seems very promising to use their chemical labeling. This is especially important in the mapping of the sequences of DNA nucleotide bases having very close spectral properties. The first experiments on the MPI of dye-labeled nucleic acid bases were quite a success [11]. 

There are many other alkylating agents which often display widely varying reactivity and specificity toward particular nucleic acid bases and particular nucleotide sequences. 

The sequences of all three pieces of RNA in the E. coli ribosomes are known as are those from many other species. These include eukaryotic mitochondrial, plas-tid, and cytosolic rRNA. From the sequences alone, it was clear that these long molecules could fold into a complex series of hairpin loops resembling those in tRNA. For example, the 16S rRNA of E. coli can fold as in Fig. 29-2A and eukaryotic 18S RNA in a similar way (Fig. 29-4).38/39/67 69 The actual secondary structures of 16S and 18S RNAs, within the folded molecules revealed by X-ray crystallography, are very similar to that shown in Fig. 29-2A. Ribosomal RNAs undergo many posttranscriptional alterations. Methylation of 2 -hydroxyls and of the nucleic acid bases as well as conversion to pseudouridines (pp. 1638-1641) predominate over 200 modifications, principally in functionally important locations that have been found in human rRNA.69a... 

Contrary to H-bonded nucleic acid base pairs discussed in the previous section, the nature of intermolecular interactions in complexes of stacked bases was analyzed more extensively. The values of minimal, maximal, and average total stabilization energies, corrected for BSSE, for a set comprising over 80 stacked bases, are plotted in Fig. 20.1. In the case of guanine-adenine and adenine-cytosine complexes, the results are presented for two sequence contexts, i.e., A/G-G/A and A/C-C/A. The symbol AA denotes the 2-oxo-adenine - complexes of oxidized bases, and this... 

The affinity towards a complementary RNA strand can be improved by using peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) [20]. These DNA mimics, in which the nucleic acid bases are linked to a polyamide backbone [21], usually exhibit improved binding properties with a complementary DNA or RNA strand [22]. The use of an excess PNA-DETA adduct 20 in a Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7), in the presence of NaCl and EDTA at 40 °C, resulted in a sequence-selective cleavage of the RNA strand 21... 

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