The RNA world hypothesis proposes that nucleic acids were once responsible for both information storage and chemical catalysis, before the advent of coded protein synthesis. However, it is difficult to imagine how nucleic acid polymers first appeared, as the abiotic chemical formation of long nucleic acid polymers from mononucleotides or short oligonucleotides remains elusive, and barriers to a...

Helicases are motor enzymes that convert the chemical energy of NTP hydrolysis into mechanical force for motion and nucleic acid strand separation. Within the cell, helicases process a range of nucleic acid sequences. It is not known whether this composite rate of moving and opening the strands of nucleic acids depends on the base sequence. Our presteady state kinetic studies of helicases from ...

A cascade CRISPR/cas nucleic acid diagnostic system, which can achieve high-sensitive and single-base specificity without target amplification, was developed for miRNA detection.

We have designed and built a data-base system for the storage of nucleic-acid sequences. The system consists of a data base ("the library") and software that manages and provides access to that data base ("the Librarian").

A new set of DNA base-nucleic acid codes and their hypercomplex number representation have been introduced for taking the probability of each nucleotide into full account. A new scoring system has been proposed to suit the hypercomplex number representation of the DNA base-nucleic acid codes and incorporated with the method of dot matrix analysis and various algorithms of sequence alignment. Th...

Dynamic RNA molecules carry out essential processes in the cell including translation and splicing. Base-pair interactions stabilize RNA into relatively rigid structures, while flexible non-base-paired regions allow RNA to undergo conformational changes required for function. To advance our understanding of RNA folding and dynamics it is critical to know the flexibility of these un-base-paired ...

The specific hybridization of complementary sequences is an essential property of nucleic acids, enabling diverse biological and biotechnological reactions and functions. However, the specificity of nucleic acid hybridization is compromised for long strands, except near the melting temperature. Here, we analytically derived the thermodynamic properties of a hybridization probe that would enable...

Abstract Artificial metal base pairs have become increasingly important in nucleic acids chemistry due to their high thermal stability, water solubility, orthogonality natural pairs, and low cost of production. These interesting properties combined with ease chemical enzymatic synthesis prompted use several practical applications, including the construction nanomolecular devices, ions sensors, ...