Dead and dying cells release nucleic acids. These extracellular RNAs and DNAs can be taken up by inflammatory cells and activate multiple nucleic acid-sensing toll-like receptors (TLR3, 7, 8, and 9). The inappropriate activation of these TLRs can engender a variety of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The redundancy of the TLR family encouraged us to seek materials that can neutralize the p...

Nucleic acid fragmentation (footprinting) by *OH radicals is used often as a tool to probe nucleic acid structure and nucleic acid-protein interactions. This method has proven valuable because it provides structural information with single base pair resolution. Recent developments in the field introduced the 'synchrotron X-ray footprinting' method, which uses a high-flux X-ray source to produce...

Accurate, reliable and reproducible quantification of nucleic acids (DNA/RNA) is important for many diagnostic applications and in routine laboratory testing, for example, for pathogen detection and detection of genetically modified organisms in food. To ensure reliable nucleic acid measurement, reference materials (RM) that are accurately characterised for quantity of target nucleic acid seque...

Oligonucleotides composed of naturally occurring nucleic acids are unsuitable for many therapeutic and biotechnological applications because of their poor biostability. Numerous nucleic acid analogues have therefore been synthesized for applications related to target-validation studies or therapeutic molecules. Locked nucleic acid (LNA) nucleotide monomers are nucleic acid analogues with a fixe...

A fast and economical procedure for the production of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) microarrays is presented. PNA oligomers are synthesized in a fully automatic manner in 96-well plates using standard Fmoc chemistry. Subsequently, the oligomers are released from the support and spotted onto glass or silicone slides, which were activated by succinimidyl ester. This process allows for a concomitant ...

Atherosclerosis arises from an excessive fibroproliferative-inflammatory response to injury of the artery wall and typically evolves over decades (1). Smooth muscle cells play a central role in the development of atherosclerotic lesions. Their ability to migrate from the medial compartment of the artery wall to the intima, where they proliferate, accumulate lipid, and generate extracellular mat...

A consideration of the earlier investigations of the nucleic acids would lead us to the conclusion that these substances yield among their hydrolytic products four purin derivatives, namely, xanthin, hypoxanthin, guanin, and adenin. Of these four bases hypoxanthin was the first discovered in this connection and was for a long time looked upon as the most constant in its occurrence, and, therefo...

The discovery of ribozymes by Cech and Altman has fundamentally changed the view of the function of RNA in chemistry, biology, and medicine (1–3). Prior to this discovery, RNA had been viewed as a passive molecule that only carried information or provided structure to RNA-protein complexes. It is now clear that RNA can act as an enzyme and is capable of catalyzing RNA splicing and cleavage, as ...

As alterations in gene expression have become a better understood component of normal development and disease pathogenesis, transcription factors and other regulators of gene expression have become an increasingly attractive target for potential therapeutic intervention. Transcription factors are generally nuclear proteins that play a critical role in gene regulation and can exert either a posi...

Nucleic acids and protein prepared from Sarcoma 180, from Ehrlich ascites tumor, from NCTC 929 cells derived from strain L, and from normal mouse liver, when injected subcutaneously in mice with cultured viable NCTC 929 strain L cells, oc casionally induce cytologie atypia in the NCTC 929 cells, characterized by giant cells, abnormal cytoplasmic shapes and staining, large nuclei, and prominence...