Under ordinary circumstances, the protein tau contributes to the normal, healthy functioning of brain neurons. In some people, though, it collects into toxic tangles that damage brain cells. Such tangles are a hallmark of ...
Jan 25, 2017
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Researchers working at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and University of Southern Denmark have managed to produce short synthetic DNA analogues – oligonucleotides – that bind directly to the gene that is mutated in Huntington's ...
Feb 20, 2017
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There is a growing body of evidence that iron in the brain may play a role in Alzheimer's disease. Lending weight to that idea, a new imaging probe has for the first time shown that in the same regions of the brain where ...
Apr 19, 2023
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Using a short, synthetic chain of chemically modified nucleotides engineered in the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School, Robert H. Brown Jr., DPhil, MD, Jonathan Watts, Ph.D., and colleagues have shown ...
Dec 23, 2021
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Muscular dystrophy is a debilitating disease that causes progressive weakening and loss of muscles. Fukuyama congenital muscular dystrophy (FCMD), the second most common form of childhood muscular dystrophy in Japan, is a ...
Dec 12, 2022
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Many patients with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, eventually develop resistance to one treatment after another. That's in part because cancer stem cells drive the disease—cells that continually self-renew. If ...
Jan 20, 2021
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Up to 45% of patients with the most common inherited neuromuscular disease could benefit from a new "cocktail" drug being developed at the University of Alberta, according to research published this week in the Proceedings ...
Feb 23, 2022
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Antisense oligonucleotides, or ASOs, are molecules that can be used to control protein levels in cells. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Adrian Krainer leveraged ASO technology to develop the first FDA-approved treatment ...
Jul 14, 2022
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Ottawa scientists have discovered a trigger that turns muscle stem cells into brown fat, a form of good fat that could play a critical role in the fight against obesity. The findings from Dr. Michael Rudnicki's lab, based ...
Feb 5, 2013
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In a study published in the Journal of Lipid Research, Saint Louis University scientist Angel Baldan, Ph.D., reports that turning off a protein found in liver and adipose tissue significantly improves blood sugar levels, ...
Dec 15, 2016
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An oligonucleotide (from Greek prefix oligo-, "having few, having little") is a short nucleic acid polymer, typically with fifty or fewer bases. Although they can be formed by bond cleavage of longer segments, they are now more commonly synthesized, in a sequence-specific manner, from individual nucleoside phosphoramidites. Automated synthesizers allow the synthesis of oligonucleotides up to about 200 bases.
Oligonucleotides are characterized by the sequence of nucleotide residues that comprise the entire molecule. The length of the oligonucleotide is usually denoted by "mer" (from Greek meros, "part"). For example, a fragment of 25 bases would be called a 25-mer. Oligonucleotides readily bind, in a sequence-specific manner, to their respective complementary oligonucleotides, DNA, or RNA to form duplexes or, less often, hybrids of a higher order. This basic property serves as a foundation for the use of oligonucleotides as probes for detecting DNA or RNA. Examples of procedures that use oligonucleotides include DNA microarrays, Southern blots, ASO analysis, fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), and the synthesis of artificial genes.
Oligonucleotides composed of 2'-deoxyribonucleotides (oligodeoxyribonucleotides) are fragments of DNA and are often used in the polymerase chain reaction, a procedure that can greatly amplify almost any small amount of DNA. There, the oligonucleotide is referred to as a primer, allowing DNA polymerase to extend the oligonucleotide and replicate the complementary strand.
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