An Overview of Peptide Nucleic Acids: Structure, Properties, and Applications

For decades, nucleic acid analogues have been emerged in molecular biology. Some of these analogues are powerful bimolecular tools in biotechnology. Among the four major classes of these synthetic molecules (XNA: xenonucleic acid, LNA: locked nucleic acid, PNA: peptide nucleic acid and morpholino), PNA is the most important. In PNA, N-aminoethyle glycine units (to which purine/pyrimidine bases have been attached), are joined together to form an achiral and peptide-like structure that mimics the behavior of DNA and can hybridize to nucleic acid and to other PNA in sequence specific manner. Because of its unique physicochemical properties, PNA in many cases prefers over natural oligonucleotide and therefore, have been exploited in some strategies and methods in the field of diagnostics and therapy. In this review, we describe the structure, biochemical properties, and biomedical applications of PNA.