Building and evaluating nucleic acid nanostructures for <i>in vivo</i> applications

Peptide-nucleic acid nanostructures for transfection.

Abstract To use nucleic acids in biomedical research and medical applications, these highly hydrophilic macromolecules have to be transported through the organism, targeted to specific cell surfaces, and have to cross cellular barriers. To this end, nanosized transfection complexes have been designed and several of them have been successfully tested. Here, the different steps of the transfectio...

Computer-aided design software for cus- tom nucleic acid nanostructures

Locked nucleic acids: promising nucleic acid analogs for therapeutic applications.

Locked Nucleic Acid (LNA) is a unique nucleic-acid modification possessing very high binding affinity and excellent specificity toward complementary RNA or DNA oligonucleotides. The remarkable properties exhibited by LNA oligonucleotides have been employed in different nucleic acid-based therapeutic strategies both in vitro and in vivo. Herein, we highlight the applications of LNA nucleotides f...

Nucleic Acid Based Biosensors for Clinical Applications

The timely monitoring and regulation of various parameters is important to many applications in food industry, clinical diagnoses, hygiene, environmental protection, drug development, forensics etc. [1]. Therefore, there is a requirement to have reliable analytical devices, which can perform rapid and accurate analyses. Biosensors have been developed using the specificity of a biological molecu...

Drug delivery systems based on nucleic acid nanostructures.

The field of DNA nanotechnology has progressed rapidly in recent years and hence a large variety of 1D-, 2D- and 3D DNA nanostructures with various sizes, geometries and shapes is readily accessible. DNA-based nanoobjects are fabricated by straight forward design and self-assembly processes allowing the exact positioning of functional moieties and the integration of other materials. At the same...