Tailoring the major groove of DNA mimic foldamers
Jiaojiao Wu, Valentina Corvaglia, Tulika Chakrabortty, Pradeep K. Mandal, Ivan Huc · 2026
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Description
Jiaojiao Wu and colleagues extend, in 2026, a family of artificial molecules that mimic DNA to fool DNA-binding proteins. These folded aromatic chains carry negative charges like DNA and can bind some proteins even more tightly than DNA itself. Until now they repeated a single building block, so they carried little sequence information, like a stretch of one base pair repeated.
The team designed four new monomer units meant to display varied chemistry in the groove that proteins read. Sixteen sequences were assembled on solid supports. Spectroscopic, crystallographic and modelling studies showed three monomers behaved as planned and loosened the molecules' conformational dynamics, while the fourth behaved in a more complex way. The modified mimics still bound a bacterial DNA-organising protein, opening routes toward mimics aimed at sequence-reading proteins.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jiaojiao Wu, Valentina Corvaglia, Tulika Chakrabortty, Pradeep K. Mandal, Ivan Huc |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 42 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |