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Author Spotlight: Advanced Single-Molecule Techniques for Investigating Telomeric Protein-DNA Interactions
Published on: August 30, 2024
Cleaving DNA with DNA
N Carmi1, S R Balkhi, R R Breaker
1Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8103, USA.
Abstract:
A DNA structure is described that can cleave single-stranded DNA oligonucleotides in the presence of ionic copper. This "deoxyribozyme" can self-cleave or can operate as a bimolecular complex that simultaneously makes use of duplex and triplex interactions to bind and cleave separate DNA substrates. Bimolecular deoxyribozyme-mediated strand scission proceeds with a kobs of 0.2 min-1, whereas the corresponding uncatalyzed reaction could not be detected. The duplex and triplex recognition domains can be altered, making possible the targeted cleavage of single-stranded DNAs with different nucleotide sequences. Several small synthetic DNAs were made to function as simple "restriction enzymes" for the site-specific cleavage of single-stranded DNA.
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