Metal-Locked DNA Three-Way Junction

摘要

DNA has attracted great interest as a promising component of nanoscale architectures because of its well-ordered structures and highly programmable nature. In particular, the conjugation of natural DNA structures with artificial functional components has opened up a growing field of supramolecular chemistry and DNA nanotechnology, which has endowed DNA with unprecedented hybridization properties and allowed the resulting structures to be controllable with external stimuli. A particularly attractive approach to obtain controllable DNA motifs is to incorporate into the DNA scaffolds metal complexes, whose coordination structures as well as thermodynamic and kinetic stabilities can be regulated by the judicious selection of metal ions and careful design of ligand-modified artificial nucleosides.