Enzymatic Synthesis of Nucleic Acids with Defined Regioisomeric 2'-5' Linkages
Christopher Cozens1, Hannes Mutschler1, Geoffrey M Nelson1
1Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge, CB2 0QH (UK).
None:
Information-bearing nucleic acids display universal 3'-5' linkages, but regioisomeric 2'-5' linkages occur sporadically in non-enzymatic RNA synthesis and may have aided prebiotic RNA replication. Herein we report on the enzymatic synthesis of both DNA and RNA with site-specific 2'-5' linkages by an engineered polymerase using 3'-deoxy- or 3'-O-methyl-NTPs as substrates. We also report the reverse transcription of the resulting modified nucleic acids back to 3'-5' linked DNA with good fidelity. This enables a fast and simple method for "structural mutagenesis" by the position-selective incorporation of 2'-5' linkages, whereby nucleic acid structure and function may be probed through local distortion by regioisomeric linkages while maintaining the wild-type base sequence as we demonstrate for the 10-23 RNA endonuclease DNAzyme.
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