Researchers' Newly Discovered Biostability in DNA Structures May Lead to Enhanced Therapeutics

A tremendous potential for biomedical applications, including targeted delivery of drugs, exists through DNA nanostructures, but one key challenge has been the limited stability of these structures in the body’s tissues and blood. Now, a University team of researchers led by Arun Richard Chandrasekaran and Ken Halvorsen of the RNA Institute has circumvented that problem by discovering a potential direct route to biostability: an already existing biostable DNA motif capable of use in the design of new drug carriers and diagnostics. The team, also consisting of Biological Sciences faculty Bijan Dey, Siu Wah Wong-Deyrup and Paromita Dey, and undergraduate researcher Javier Vilcapoma, made two breakthroughs, the first being that the PX DNA has remarkable nuclease resistance and biostability and the second being that the biostability is correlated to the number of crossover points.