Recent advancements in bionanomaterial applications of peptide nucleic acid assemblies

Abstract

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is a unique combination of peptides and nucleic acids. PNA can exhibit hydrogen bonding interactions with complementary nucleobases like DNA/RNA. Also, its polyamide backbone allows easy incorporation of biomolecules like peptides and proteins to build hybrid molecular constructs. Because of chimeric structural properties, PNA has lots of potential to build diverse nanostructures. However, progress in the PNA material field is still immature compared with its massive applications in antisense oligonucleotide research. Examples of well‐defined molecular assemblies have been reported with PNA amphiphiles, self‐assembling guanine‐PNA monomers/dimers, and PNA‐decorated nucleic acids/ polymers/ peptides. All these works indicate the great potential of PNA to be used as bionanomaterials. The review summarizes the recent reports on PNA‐based nanostructures and their versatile applications. Additionally, this review shares a perspective to promote a better understanding of controlling molecular assembly by the systematic structural modifications of PNA monomers.

Dynamics of terminal fraying–peeling and hydrogen bonds dictates the sequential vs. cooperative melting pathways of nanoscale DNA and PNA triplexes

“…It may help in developing more physical and realistic approaches to designing PNA-based nanostructures and biotechnological applications. 73,74 PNA or DNA triplexes can produce complex nanostructures with programmable forms and sizes. Very recently, new analogs of PNA termed bimodal/janus PNAs have been reported, 75–77 which can bind to two different complementary DNA/RNA sequences generating polyplexes composed of fused double duplexes 75 and triplex of duplexes, 76,77 which show a synergistic enhancement of thermal stabilities of both duplexes and triplexes.…”