Forced Intercalation Peptide Nucleic Acid Probes for the Detection of an Adenosine-to-Inosine Modification

Abstract

The deamination of adenosine to inosine is an important modification in nucleic acids that functionally recodes the identity of the nucleobase to a guanosine. Current methods to analyze and detect this single nucleotide change, such as sequencing and PCR, typically require time-consuming or costly procedures. Alternatively, fluorescent “turn-on” probes that result in signal enhancement in the presence of target are useful tools for real-time detection and monitoring of nucleic acid modification. Here we describe forced-intercalation PNA (FIT-PNA) probes that are designed to bind to inosine-containing nucleic acids and use thiazole orange (TO), 4-dimethylamino-naphthalimide (4DMN), and malachite green (MG) fluorogenic dyes to detect A-to-I editing events. We show that incorporation of the dye as a surrogate base negatively affects the duplex stability but does not abolish binding to targets. We then determined that the identity of the adjacent nucleobase and temperature affect the overall signal and fluorescence enhancement in the presence of inosine, achieving an 11-fold increase, with a limit of detection (LOD) of 30 pM. We determine that TO and 4DMN probes are viable candidates to enable selective inosine detection for biological applications.

Double FIT hybridization probes – towards enhancing brightness, turn-on and specificity of RNA detection

“…14,20 As a result, FIT probes provide for single nucleotide specic uorescent signalling regardless of hybridization delity. This property has facilitated the real-time detection of single nucleotide alterations in in vitro assays 21,22 and uorescence microscopic imaging. [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] The FIT probe concept has also been applied for detection of double strands via triplex formation, [31][32][33] and in signalling aptamers.…”