Protease Probes Built from DNA: Multispectral Fluorescent DNA-Peptide Conjugates as Caspase Chemosensors

摘要

The direct monitoring of enzyme activities is broadly useful in many fields, ranging from biochemistry to medicinal chemistry and biology. A biological process often involves multiple enzymes, which can work independently or cooperatively to control a specific biological event. Monitoring their activities can provide markers of the progress of such a process (such as the cascade of caspase activity that occurs in apoptosis), and yield information about the mechanism and timing of the interacting species. The ability to track multiple targets in a single event or different processes simultaneously could greatly improve our basic understanding, and facilitate biological and clinical studies as well.