ACS Omega, Volume 3, Issue 11
- Anthology ID:
- G18-44
- Month:
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Venue:
- GWF
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- URL:
- https://gwf-uwaterloo.github.io/gwf-publications/G18-44
- DOI:
Reselection Yielding a Smaller and More Active Silver-Specific DNAzyme
Lide Gu
|
Runjhun Saran
|
Wanli Yan
|
Po‐Jung Jimmy Huang
|
Shujun Wang
|
Mingsheng Lyu
|
Juewen Liu
Ag10c is a recently reported RNA-cleaving DNAzyme obtained from in vitro selection. Its cleavage activity selectively requires Ag+ ions, and thus it has been used as a sensor for Ag+ detection. However, the previous selection yielded very limited information regarding its sequence requirement, since only ∼0.1% of the population in the final library were related to Ag10c and most other sequences were inactive. In this work, we performed a reselection by randomizing the 19 important nucleotides in Ag10c in such a way that a purine has an equal chance of being A or G, whereas a pyrimidine has an equal chance of being T or C. The round 3 library of the reselection was carefully analyzed and a statistic understanding of the relative importance of each nucleotide was obtained. At the same time, a more active mutant was identified, containing two mutated nucleotides. Further analysis indicated new base pairs leading to an enzyme with smaller catalytic loops but with ∼200% activity of the original Ag10c, and also excellent selectivity for Ag+. Therefore, a more active mutant of Ag10c was obtained and further truncations were successfully performed, which might be better candidates for developing new biosensors for silver. A deeper biochemical understanding was also obtained using this reselection method.