DNA structures and its siblings

[Pattielli]

I would like to ask a question about PNA and Morpholino... I am sorry, I look at their structure images but I still couldn't see anything that can be called similarities. The Morpholino has ring structure which is the same as DNA but PNA has no rings at all...

Would you please explain a little more about this for me ?

Thank you very much,

[iansmith]

Peptide nucleic acide (PNA) is a nucleic acid analog in which the sugar phosphate backbone of natural nucleic acid has been replaced by a synthetic peptide backbone usually formed from N-(2-amino-ethyl)-glycine units, resulting in an achiral and uncharged mimic.

http://people.bu.edu/hkuhn/images/FASEB_review.pdf

[Monique]

So what would be the applications of this PNA nucleic acid analog?

[iansmith]

Gene silencing, Inhibition of translation and gene specific expression.

http://www.cell-research.com/20042/111.pdf
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=19253

[Monique]

The molecule is able to bind to regular nucleic acids and thereby disturbs their function, what I understand from a quick look. There are also synthetic nucleic acids that look like RNA, but cannot degraded, thus stable RNAi probes can be made from those, which in turn are used for gene silencing. Apparently two different approaches with synthetic nucleic acids?