Paper published in OBC
Afaf El-Sagheer and Vee Vee Cheong’s paper Rapid chemical ligation of oligonucleotides by the Diels–Alder reaction has been published as an advance article in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. The paper shows how the Diels-Alder reaction can be used to ligate three oligonucleotides simultaneously in aqueous solution, within 1 minute at room temperature.
PNAS paper published online
Afaf and Tom’s paper entitled New strategy for the synthesis of chemically modified RNA constructs exemplified by hairpin and hammerhead ribozymes is available on the PNAS web site.
Artificial DNA Journal launched
The new journal Artificial DNA: PNA & XNA has been launched. It is the first international peer-reviewed journal to focus exclusively on the chemistry and chemical biology of non-natural nucleic acids and their mimics. The editorial board includes Tom Brown, and the first issue includes a paper from the Brown group: Peptide nucleic acid probes with charged photocleavable mass markers: Towards PNA-based MALDI-TOF MS genetic analysis by Rachel Ball et al.