Synthesis of Oligonucleotides Used as Probes; Purification by HPLC

Abstract

Synthetic oligonucleotides are useful research tools in molecular biology [3, 7]. As hybridization probes, they can distinguish a perfect match in the target sequences from various single-base-pair mismatches [20, 21]. They have been used to introduce mutations in DNA at specific sites [8, 13, 15, 22, 23] as well as to probe for mutations at specific loci in genes [4, 9, 13, 20, 22, 23]. They have also been employed in the isolation of specific DNA sequences from a bank of cloned cDNA [6, 16, 19, 21] and in the determination of RNA secondary structure [11]. Moreover, the use of antisense DNA or RNA oligonucleotides to block the translation or processing of specific mRNAs provides a powerful tool for studies of the regulation of gene expression and development [2, 5].