UC Irvine

Current progress in polymerases engineering have enabled the delivery of heredity genetic information between the DNA and unnatural nucleic acid that are composed of threose nucleic acid (TNA). TNA (α-L-threofuranosyl-(3′,2′) nucleic acid) is an artificial genetic polymer with the α-L-threofuranosyl sugar that are connected by 2’ to 3’ phosphodiester linkage. Structure difference from DNA and RNA, TNA was further explored as a source of nuclease resistant affinity reagents in therapeutic application. Several examples of protein targeting experiments in-vitro using TNA sequences-folded structures have been investigated in our lab. Since TNA molecules are naturally unavailable, synthetic approach has been developed previously for initial research explorations. Further synthetic optimization have been investigated in this dissertation to provide quantitative amount of TNA substrates for the downstream research applications in molecular biology.