Click chemistry to aid biotechnology research
20 Apr 2012 by Evoluted New Media
A new technique to click together DNA and RNA segments has won researchers from Southampton and Oxford a £4 million grant from the BBSRC.
Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Southampton will use the grant – a strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) grant – to develop the technique, which could make biotechnology research cheaper and more efficient.
The researchers have found that clicking RNA and DNA together using chemical methods could replace the use of enzymes and could enable the production of useful DNA and RNA structures more efficiently and on a large scale the is currently possible.
“Synthesising long DNA molecules by chemical methods is slow and requires a great deal of skill. To avoid this, biologists usually ask chemists to make a large number of very short DNA strands which they glue together using enzymes,” said Professor Tom Brown from Southampton.
“These enzymes, which have evolved to work under very specific conditions, work brilliantly if you treat them kindly. However, they are delicate, temperamental and refuse to work with heavily modified DNA or RNA.
Brown says the new technique creates chemical linkages which are stronger and less choosy than those made by enzymes, and can be produced in large amounts for industrial scale applications. It also opens up the possibility of producing new DNA structures decorated with a variety of useful modifications.
However, this click method suffers one problem – it inserts an unusual linkage into DNA. Researchers have shown that this unusual link is ignored by bacterial cells, which copy and read a strand of DNA that has been clicked together. Enzymes are also able to use it to make RNA.
DNA may be used to treat a range of diseases – including certain cancers and HIV – and researchers hope that using click chemistry could enable them to switch off the appropriate gene and therefore combat the disease.
“We are really excited by the possibilities that this project could open up,” said Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of BBSRC. “The ‘click’ technique could make DNA production cheaper, quicker and more efficient and deliver a range of useful new clinical and commercial molecules. However, we also need to be aware of the implications of making DNA assembly more widespread and accessible.”
