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Functionalization Of Peptide Nucleic Acids Via Post-Synthetic Click Chemistry, Xiaoxiao Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) has shown great potential in molecular diagnostics, antisense/antigene therapy and nanotechnology. Like other synthetic nucleic acids and artificial analogues, PNA has been extensively modified to achieve better performance in these applications. To efficiently develop PNA probes for molecular diagnosis, this thesis is focused on versatile functionalization of PNA via post-synthetic click chemistry.

Chapter 2 presents the synthesis of quencher-free PNA molecular beacons (MBs) targeting a cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) sequence mutation. To avoid the tedious synthesis of functionalized PNA monomers for probe development, a simple approach to modify PNA oligomers by post-synthetic on-resin click …

Synthesis Of Carbohydrate Functionalized Dendrons For Use As Multivalent Scaffold And In Self-Assembled Structures, Namrata Jain

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Carbohydrates are implicated in a large number of biological processes ranging from cell-cell interactions to bacterial and viral infection. Lectins are carbohydrate-binding proteins that are generally specific for certain sugars. However, typical carbohydrate–lectin interactions tend to have very low monomeric binding affinities. In many cases, the binding of saccharide ligands by protein receptors can be improved significantly through the attachment of multiple saccharide residues to a common support. Dendronized polymers constitute a class of macromolecules whose nanoscale size, rigidity, and functionality can be controlled with precision by tuning their molecular architecture. It is hypothesized that due to their large size …