Applications of Peptide Nucleic Acids

Several exciting new developments in the applications of the DNA mimic peptide nucleic acid (PNA) have been published recently. A possible breakthrough may have come in efforts to develop PNA into gene therapeutic drugs. In eukaryotic systems, antisense activity of PNAs (as peptide conjugates) has been reported in nerve cells and even in rats upon injection into the brain, and antisense activity has also been demonstrated in Escherichia coli. PNA hybridization technology has developed rapidly within in situ hybridization, and exciting new methods based on MALDI-TOF detection have also been presented.