Study of Photochemical Cytosine to Uracil Transition via Ultrafast Photo-Cross-Linking Using Vinylcarbazole Derivatives in Duplex DNA.

Gene therapies, including genome editing, RNAi, anti-sense technology and chemical DNA editing are becoming major methods for the treatment of genetic disorders. Techniques like CRISPR-Cas9, zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) and transcription activator-like effector-based nuclease (TALEN) are a few such enzymatic techniques. Most enzymatic genome editing techniques have their disadvantages. Thus, non-enzymatic and non-invasive technologies for nucleic acid editing has been reported in this study which might possess some advantages over the older methods of DNA manipulation. 3-cyanovinyl carbazole (K) based nucleic acid editing takes advantage of photo-cross-linking between a target pyrimidine and the K to afford deamination of cytosine and convert it to uracil. This method previously required the use of high temperatures but, in this study, it has been optimized to take place at physiological conditions. Different counter bases (inosine, guanine and cytosine) complementary to the target cytosine were used, along with derivatives of K (K and K) to afford the deamination at physiological conditions.