All terrestrial organisms depend on nucleic acids (RNA and DNA), which use pyrimidine and purine nucleobases to encode genetic information. Carbon-rich meteorites may have been important sources of organic compounds required for the emergence of life on the early Earth; however, the origin and formation of nucleobases in meteorites has been debated for over 50 y. So far, the few nucleobases rep...

A neutral uridine-based amphiphile is described which condenses plasmid DNA. AFM studies show that the three distinct structural components of the amphiphile (i.e, nucleobase, alkyl chains, and poly(ethylene glycol)) are required for the formation of DNA-amphiphile supramolecular assemblies on a mica surface.

this study aims to design some dual-target anticancer candidates, capable to act as an alkylating agent as well as a thymidylate synthase (ts) inhibitor. the designed scaffold is a combination of nucleobase, amino acid and aziridine structures. the candidates are docked into ts and three dna double strand structures and evaluated based on their binding interaction energies and ligand efficienci...

Fast, cost effective, single-shot DNA sequencing could be the prelude of a new era in genetics. As DNA encodes the information for the production of proteins in all known living beings on Earth, determining the nucleobase sequences is the first and necessary step in that direction. Graphene-based nanopore devices hold great promise for next-generation DNA sequencing. In this work, we develop a ...

Open AccessCCS ChemistryRESEARCH ARTICLE1 Jun 2021Optically Active Nucleobase-Functionalized Polynorbornenes Mimicking Double-Helix DNA Li Wang, Nan Lu, Shuai Huang, Meng Xu-Man Chen and Hong Yang Wang School of Chemistry Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu Province Hi-Tech Key Laboratory for Bio-Medical Research, Institute Advanced Materials, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189 Google Scholar More ...

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is a synthetic analogue of DNA that commonly has an N-aminoethyl glycine backbone. The crystal structures of two PNA duplexes, one containing eight standard nucleobase pairs (GGCATGCC)(2), and the other containing the same nucleobase pairs and a central pair of bipyridine ligands, have been solved with a resolution of 1.22 and 1.10 Å, respectively. The non-modified PN...

Human toxic responses are very often related to metabolism. Liver metabolism is traditionally studied, but other organs also convert chemicals and drugs to reactive metabolites leading to toxicity. When DNA damage is found, the effects are termed genotoxic. Here we describe a comprehensive new approach to evaluate chemical genotoxicity pathways from metabolites formed in-situ by a broad spectru...

Nucleic acid double helices are stabilized by hydrogen bonding and stacking forces (a combination of hydrophobic, dispersive and electrostatic forces) of the base pairs in the helix. One would predict the hydrogen bonding contributions to increase and the stacking contributions to decrease as the water activity in the medium decreases. Study of nucleobase paired duplexes in the absence of water...