Nucleic acid aptamers are an emerging class of affinity ligands

Question # 00085562 Posted By: kimwood Updated on: 07/27/2015 02:43 AM Due on: 08/26/2015
Subject Biology Topic Biochemistry Tutorials:
Question
Dot Image
Nucleic acid aptamers are an emerging class of affinity ligands that can bind to their targets with very high affinities and specificities. Moreover, they can be synthesized chemically. Therefore, aptamers have attracted great attention in a variety of biological and biomedical fields such as cancer diagnosis, drug delivery and regenerative medicine. For instance, researchers have integrated aptamers into microfluidic systems to make artificial tissues to capture circulating tumor cells from a patient’s blood for in vitro diagnosis. The ability to enumerate and characterize circulating tumor cells is expected to open a new avenue for cancer diagnosis as well as the detection of other types of cells in different biological and biomedical systems. However, the identification of aptamers faces many challenges. For instance, if our purpose is to select an aptamer that plays a role at the solution-cell interface, we will not want aptamer uptake to occur. To avoid cellular uptake, researchers often have to do aptamer discovery in the ice bath. One leading research group identified an aptamer that can bind to human Burkitt’s lymphoma cells in the ice bath. The sequence of this aptamer is: TCACACTTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACACCGTGGAGGATAGTTCGGTGGCTGTTCAGGGTCTCCTCCCGGTG However, researchers found that this aptamer worked well in the ice bath but did not work when it was delivered in the body. Please analyze what the potential problem is and why it leads to the failure in the body. 1) to simply the problem, compare the structures and gibbs free energy values of the aptamer at 0 and 37 degree Celsius. 2) please also examine how the concentration of magnesium affects gibbs free energy by comparing three concentrations including 0, 2 and 5 mM. The concentration of Na+ is 138 mM.)
Dot Image
Tutorials for this Question
  1. Tutorial # 00080247 Posted By: kimwood Posted on: 07/27/2015 02:43 AM
    Puchased By: 2
    Tutorial Preview
    cells is expected to open a new avenue for cancer ...
    Attachments
    soln.zip (16.24 KB)

Great! We have found the solution of this question!

Whatsapp Lisa