The nuclei of mammalian liver cells have been shown to contain, in addition to desoxypentose nucleic acid (DNA), a pentose nucleic acid (PNA) which is functionally different from the PNA of the cytoplasm (1). In the investigations to be described here the proport,ions of purine and pyrimidine in these two types of PNA in calf liver, kidney, thymus, and heart have been found to be strikingly dif...

We present a new versatile program, SCHNAaP, for the analysis of double-helical nucleic acid structures. The program uses mathematically rigorous and fully reversible procedures for calculating the structural parameters: the Cambridge University Engineering Department Helix computation Scheme (CEHS) is used to determine the local helical parameters and an analogous procedure is used to determin...

IsoGNA, an isomer of glycerol nucleic acid GNA, is a flexible (acyclic) nucleic acid with bases directly attached to its linear backbone. IsoGNA exhibits (limited) base-pairing properties which are unique compared to other known flexible nucleic acids. Herein, we report on the details of the preparation of isoGNA phosphoramidites and an alternative route for the synthesis of the adenine derivat...

The dual information-function nature of nucleic acids has been exploited in the laboratory to isolate novel receptors and catalysts from random DNA and RNA sequences by cycles of in vitro selection and amplification. This strategy is particularly effective because, unlike polypeptides with random amino acid sequences, nucleic acids with random base sequences are often capable of stably folding ...

We propose a rapid chemical strategy for identifying base pairs in structured nucleic acid systems. The approach goes beyond traditional chemical mapping approaches by monitoring perturbations of each residue's chemical accessibility in response to systematic mutagenesis of residues that are distant in sequence but nearby in three dimensions. As a proof of concept, we present high-throughput di...

We have simulated ionization of purine nucleic acid components in the gas phase and in a water environment. The vertical and adiabatic ionization processes were calculated at the PMP2/aug-cc-pVDZ level with the TDDFT method applied to obtain ionization from the deeper lying orbitals. The water environment was modeled via microsolvation approach and using a nonequilibrium polarizable continuum m...