Journal
JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR EVOLUTION
Volume 67, Issue 1, Pages 95-102Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00239-008-9130-4
Keywords
aptamer; RNA; bioinformatics; in vitro selection
Funding
- NIBIB NIH HHS [R01 EB007689-01A1, R01 EB007689] Funding Source: Medline
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Aptamers are nucleic acid molecules selected in vitro to bind a particular ligand. While numerous experimental studies have examined the sequences, structures, and functions of individual aptamers, considerably fewer studies have applied bioinformatics approaches to try to infer more general principles from these individual studies. We have used a large Aptamer Database to parse the contributions of both random and constant regions to the secondary structures of more than 2000 aptamers. We find that the constant, primer-binding regions do not, in general, contribute significantly to aptamer structures. These results suggest that (a) binding function is not contributed to nor constrained by constant regions; (b) in consequence, the landscape of functional binding sequences is sparse but robust, favoring scenarios for short, functional nucleic acid sequences near origins; and (c) many pool designs for the selection of aptamers are likely to prove robust.
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