Current Organic Chemistry - Volume 4, Issue 9, 2000

The ubiquitous and essential nature of DNA predicts that enzymes responsible for DNA synthesis evolved early and share a common design and mechanism of action. DNA polymerases from many different organisms do exhibit striking similarities in their overall architecture, the design of the catalytic site, and the mechanism of nucleotidyl transfer. In spite of these shared features, however, DNA polymerases display an astoni Read More

The interactions of small molecules with nucleic acids have provoked considerable interest in the field of anticancer drug design over the past three decades; however, critical information linking the physical-chemical properties associated with these complexes with their biological effectiveness remains unclear. Significant progress has been made towards unraveling the structural and dynamic properties of many ligand-DNA co Read More

Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNA) invented ten years ago are emerging rapidly as useful molecules in DNA hybridization and antisense techniques. Although therapeutic drugs based on PNA are still not in sight, applications in diagnostics, in particular in situ hybridization and PCR based systems, are making rapid strides. The simple structure of PNA in combination with impressive DNA mimicking properties has already provided in Read More

The development of high throughput techniques, such as DNA microarrays, engages interest in many biomedical research fields. They are becoming one of the preferred methods for large-scale expression analyses. The power of this technology is that it allows the profiling of thousands of genes in one single experiment. There are two main array-based technologies: cDNA and oligonucleotide arrays hundreds to thousan Read More