Synthetic Biotin-streptavidin Replacement for Use in the Development of Clinical Diagnostics

This technology includes an alternative synthetic biotin-streptavidin replacement system for use in the development of clinical diagnostics. Peptide nucleic acids (PNA) when functionalized onto the surface of microspheres are capable of targeting short RNA targets from solutions. However, when the target nucleic acid becomes longer and complicated in structure, the PNA no longer efficiently binds due to steric hindrance from the microspheres and/or slow hybridization kinetics of larger nucleic acid targets. To circumvent this issue, nucleic acid probes are used with a biotin-streptavidin system to have a two-step hybridization-capture where a biotinylated free probe hybridizes to a target nucleic acid and is then captured on a streptavidin coated bead. Here, we propose an alternative; isolation of target nucleic acids from a complex mixture is enabled by the use of cyclopentane peptide nucleic acids with two different chiralities: right-handed helices that bind nucleic acids and left-handed helices that are biorthogonal to binding nucleic acids but will bind to other left-handed molecules.