Exploring Artificial Nucleic Acid Mimicking Peptide Nanofibers

Abstract

Nucleic acids play key roles in Nature, including storage of genetic information and translation into a wide variety of proteins that collectively build up cells. Their intrinsic programmability can be utilized to bind specific targets for a wide variety of biomedical applications. However, naturally derived nucleic acids are susceptible to degradation and their large-scale synthesis is costly. Although artificial polymeric nucleic acids show great promise, they are typically more flexible, and therefore their secondary structure is hard to control. Here, we designed polymerizable monomers that upon free-radical polymerization were able to form micrometer-long fibrous structures containing m..