Photocleavable Phosphoramidites

PC Biotin Phosphoramidite can be used to prepare 5’-biotinylated oligonucleotides suitable for capture by streptavidin in a mode similar to our popular 5’ Biotin Phosphoramidite.   Amino- and thiol-modified oligonucleotides have proven to be very useful for the attachment of a variety of haptens and fluorophores, as well as for the tethering of the oligonucleotides to a diversity of beads and surfaces.   PC Amino-Modifier Phosphoramidite is used to prepare 5’-amino-modified oligonucleotides suitable for subsequent photocleavage.  PC Spacer Phosphoramidite can be used as an intermediary to attach any modification reagent, available as a phosphoramidite, to the terminus of oligonucleotides.  After photocleavage, a 5’-phosphate is generated on the DNA, rendering it suitable for further biological transformations, such as gene construction and cloning after ligation.

A versatile photocleavable DNA building block has been described by researchers in Washington University, Missouri and used in phototriggered hybridization.¹  This reagent has also been used in the design of multifunctional DNA and RNA conjugates² for the in vitro selection of new molecules catalyzing biomolecular reactions. Researchers at Bruker Daltonik in Germany have also developed genoSNIP, a method for single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry.³ This method uses size reduction of primer extension products by incorporation of the photocleavable linker for phototriggering strand breaks near to the 3’ end of the extension primer.  PC Linker can be incorporated into oligonucleotides at any position by standard automated DNA synthesis methodology.  PC Linker Phosphoramidite has the added advantage in that photocleavage results in monophosphate fragments at both the 3’- and 5’-termini of the oligonucleotide fragments.