McCarte Blair, Yeung Owen T, Speakman Alexander J, Elfick Alistair, Dunn Katherine E
School of Engineering, Institute for Bioengineering, University of Edinburgh, The King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3DW, Scotland, UK.
Biochem Biophys Rep. 2022 Jun 4;31:101293. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrep.2022.101293. eCollection 2022 Sep.
Non-canonical forms of DNA are attracting increasing interest for applications in nanotechnology. It is frequently convenient to characterize DNA molecules using a label-free approach such as ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy. In this paper we present the results of our investigation into the use of this technique to probe the folding of quadruplex and triplex nanoswitches. We confirmed that four G-quartets were necessary for folding at sub-mM concentrations of potassium and found that the wrong choice of sequence for the linker between G-tracts could dramatically disrupt folding, presumably due to the presence of kinetic traps in the folding landscape. In the case of the triplex nanoswitch we examined, we found that the UV spectrum showed a small change in absorbance when a triplex was formed. We anticipate that our results will be of interest to researchers seeking to design DNA nanoswitches based on quadruplexes and triplexes.
非标准形式的DNA在纳米技术应用中越来越受到关注。使用诸如紫外吸收光谱等无标记方法来表征DNA分子通常很方便。在本文中，我们展示了我们对使用该技术探测四链体和三链体纳米开关折叠的研究结果。我们证实，在亚毫摩尔浓度的钾离子条件下折叠需要四个G-四联体，并且发现G-链之间连接子序列的错误选择会极大地破坏折叠，这可能是由于折叠过程中存在动力学陷阱。在我们研究的三链体纳米开关的情况下，我们发现当形成三链体时，紫外光谱显示吸光度有微小变化。我们预计，我们的结果将引起寻求设计基于四链体和三链体的DNA纳米开关的研究人员的兴趣。
