Dendritic Nucleic Acid Probes

Nucleic acid dendrimers are three dimensional networks assembled via hybridization of nucleic acid monomers. Polyprobe has developed reagents and methods for the macromolecular assembly of nucleic acid dendrimers. Dendrimer size can be accurately controlled in the range of a few hundred base pairs to more than ten million base pairs. The resulting molecules have multiple single stranded regions and number of single stranded regions are dependent on the size of the dendrimer (typically 10E9 binding sites per nanogram dendrimer). Specificity for a particular sequence ca be added via hybridization to the available single stranded regions. Nucleic acid dendrimers can carry multiple label molecules and thereby amplify the label signal. We intend to assemble DNA dendrimers and determine the utility of the dendrimers in hybridization assays.