ISBN 9783843921817

978-3-8439-2181-7, Reihe Biochemie

Katarzyna Wawrzyniak-Turek
On folding and function of natural and artificial aptamers and riboswitches

237 Seiten, Dissertation Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (2015), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

Apart from their role in encoding, transmitting and expressing the genetic information, the nucleic acids are known to function as enzymes (ribozymes, deoxyribozymes), regulatory elements (riboswitches, siRNAs) and sensing motifs (aptamers). Such functional nucleic acids are identified among natural non-coding RNAs or they can be isolated in the laboratory from random nucleic acid libraries by in vitro evolution. Both natural and artificial RNA and DNA molecules find a number of applications in molecular biology, nanotechnology, imaging and diagnostics.

In this thesis several functional nucleic acid motifs, including recently discovered molybdenum cofactor riboswitch and an RNA ligating deoxyribozyme, were studied using established biochemical assays. However, the main focus of the work is on development of the new methods that facilitate the study of nucleic acid function and structure as well as on developing new nucleic acid aptamers.