Nucleic Acids

Abstract

Nucleic acids are essential components of all organisms. Deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA), most commonly double helical, encode the genetic information contained in living cells. Ribonucleic acids (RNA), a more diverse class of biopolymers able to adopt helical and other more complex tertiary structures, carry out a variety of intracellular functions, including transmitting the genetic message to the site of protein synthesis. Both DNA and RNA interact with a host of other molecules, eg, proteins, drugs, as well as other nucleic acids and nucleic acid constituents. The specificity of these interactions may be related to local sequence‐dependent structural variation. The structural characteristics of nucleic acids and their constituents are discussed. Development of techniques to synthesize oligonucleotides, which are short, well‐defined sequences of DNA or RNA, provides an opportunity to study nucleic acid structure in detail. In addition, oligonucleotides have proved invaluable in analytical procedures. The unique ability of nucleic acids to bind to self‐complementary sequences has been exploited in the design of oligonucleotide probes and in antisense drug strategies. Methods for synthesizing Oligonucleotides, including both unmodified and modified analogs are discussed.