A Novel Pyrrolidinyl PNA Showing High Sequence Specificity and Preferential Binding to DNA over RNA

Abstract
A novel conformationally constrained pyrrolidinyl peptide nucleic acid (PNA) carrying an d-aminopyrrolidine carboxylic acid (d-Apc) spacer was synthesized, and its interactions with complementary oligo- and polynucleotides were studied by UV and CD spectroscopy. The decathymine PNA formed very stable PNA−DNA complexes with poly(dA) and (dA)10 by a sequence-specific A-T pairing. The interaction with poly(rA) gave the corresponding PNA−RNA complex with much lower stability.