Metal-Modified Nucleic Acids: Metal-Mediated Base Pairs, Triples, and Tetrads

Abstract

The incorporation of metal ions into nucleic acids by means of metal-mediated base pairs represents a promising and prominent strategy for the site-specific decoration of these self-assembling supramolecules with metal-based functionality. Over the past 20 years, numerous nucleoside surrogates have been introduced in this respect, broadening the metal scope by providing perfectly tailored metal-binding sites. More recently, artificial nucleosides derived from natural purine or pyrimidine bases have moved into the focus of Ag^I -mediated base pairing, due to their expected compatibility with regular Watson-Crick base pairs. This minireview summarizes these advances in metal-mediated base pairing but also includes further recent progress in the field. Moreover, it addresses other aspects of metal-modified nucleic acids, highlighting an expansion of the concept to metal-mediated base triples (in triple helices and three-way junctions) and metal-mediated base tetrads (in quadruplexes). For all types of metal-modified nucleic acids, proposed or accomplished applications are briefly mentioned, too.

Keywords: bioinorganic chemistry; metal-mediated base pairs; nucleic acid; quadruplex; triplex.