Nonenzymatic Primer Extension Research Articles

Transient states during the annealing of mismatched and bulged oligonucleotides.

Oligonucleotide hybridization is crucial in various biological, prebiotic and nanotechnological processes, including gene regulation, non-enzymatic primer extension and DNA nanodevice assembly. Although extensive research has focused on the thermodynamics and kinetics of nucleic acid hybridization, the behavior of complex mixtures and the outcome of competition for target binding remain less well understood. In this study, we investigate the impact of mismatches and bulges in a 12bp DNA or RNA duplex on its association (kon) and dissociation (koff) kinetics. We find that such defects have relatively small effects on the association kinetics, while the dissociation kinetics vary in a position-dependent manner by up to 6 orders of magnitude. Building upon this observation, we explored a competition scenario involving multiple oligonucleotides, and observed a transient low specificity of probe hybridization to fully versus partially complementary targets in solution. We characterize these long-lived metastable states and their evolution toward equilibrium, and show that sufficiently long-lived mis-paired duplexes can serve as substrates for prebiotically relevant chemical copying reactions. Our results suggest that transient low accuracy states may spontaneously emerge within all complex nucleic acid systems comprising a large enough number of competing strands, with potential repercussions for gene regulation in the realm of modern biology and the prebiotic preservation of genetic information.

A Model for the Emergence of RNA from a Prebiotically Plausible Mixture of Ribonucleotides, Arabinonucleotides, and 2'-Deoxynucleotides.

The abiotic synthesis of ribonucleotides is thought to have been an essential step toward the emergence of the RNA world. However, it is likely that the prebiotic synthesis of ribonucleotides was accompanied by the simultaneous synthesis of arabinonucleotides, 2′-deoxyribonucleotides, and other variations on the canonical nucleotides. In order to understand how relatively homogeneous RNA could have emerged from such complex mixtures, we have examined the properties of arabinonucleotides and 2′-deoxyribonucleotides in nonenzymatic template-directed primer extension reactions. We show that nonenzymatic primer extension with activated arabinonucleotides is much less efficient than with activated ribonucleotides, and furthermore that once an arabinonucleotide is incorporated, continued primer extension is strongly inhibited. As previously shown, 2′-deoxyribonucleotides are also less efficiently incorporated in primer extension reactions, but the difference is more modest. Experiments with mixtures of nucleotides suggest that the coexistence of ribo- and arabinonucleotides does not impede the copying of RNA templates. Moreover, chimeric oligoribonucleotides containing 2′-deoxy- or arabinonucleotides are effective templates for RNA synthesis. We propose that the initial genetic polymers were random sequence chimeric oligonucleotides formed by untemplated polymerization, but that template copying chemistry favored RNA synthesis; multiple rounds of replication may have led to pools of oligomers composed mainly of RNA.

Non-enzymatic primer extension with strand displacement.

Non-enzymatic RNA self-replication is integral to the emergence of the 'RNA World'. Despite considerable progress in non-enzymatic template copying, demonstrating a full replication cycle remains challenging due to the difficulty of separating the strands of the product duplex. Here, we report a prebiotically plausible approach to strand displacement synthesis in which short 'invader' oligonucleotides unwind an RNA duplex through a toehold/branch migration mechanism, allowing non-enzymatic primer extension on a template that was previously occupied by its complementary strand. Kinetic studies of single-step reactions suggest that following invader binding, branch migration results in a 2:3 partition of the template between open and closed states. Finally, we demonstrate continued primer extension with strand displacement by employing activated 3'-aminonucleotides, a more reactive proxy for ribonucleotides. Our study suggests that complete cycles of non-enzymatic replication of the primordial genetic material may have been facilitated by short RNA oligonucleotides.

Generation of functional RNAs from inactive oligonucleotide complexes by non-enzymatic primer extension.

The earliest genomic RNAs had to be short enough for efficient replication, while simultaneously serving as unfolded templates and effective ribozymes. A partial solution to this paradox may lie in the fact that many functional RNAs can self-assemble from multiple fragments. Therefore, in early evolution, genomic RNA fragments could have been significantly shorter than unimolecular functional RNAs. Here, we show that unstable, nonfunctional complexes assembled from even shorter 3′-truncated oligonucleotides can be stabilized and gain function via non-enzymatic primer extension. Such short RNAs could act as good templates due to their minimal length and complex-forming capacity, while their minimal length would facilitate replication by relatively inefficient polymerization reactions. These RNAs could also assemble into nascent functional RNAs and undergo conversion to catalytically active forms, by the same polymerization chemistry used for replication that generated the original short RNAs. Such phenomena could have substantially relaxed requirements for copying efficiency in early nonenzymatic replication systems.

Synthesis and Nonenzymatic Template-Directed Polymerization of 2′-Amino-2′-deoxythreose Nucleotides

Threose nucleic acid (TNA) is a potential alternative genetic material that may have played a role in the early evolution of life. We have developed a novel synthesis of 2′-amino modified TNA nucleosides (2′-NH2-TNA) based on a cycloaddition reaction between a glycal and an azodicarboxylate, followed by direct nucleosidation of the cycloadduct. Using this route, we synthesized the thymine and guanine 2′-NH2-TNA nucleosides in seven steps with 24% and 12% overall yield, respectively. We then phosphorylated the guanine nucleoside on the 3′-hydroxyl, activated the phosphate as the 2-methylimidazolide, and tested the ability of the activated nucleotide to copy C4 RNA, DNA, and TNA templates by nonenzymatic primer extension. We measured pseudo-first-order rate constants for the first nucleotide addition step of 1.5, 0.97, and 0.57 h–1 on RNA, DNA, and TNA templates, respectively, at pH 7.5 and 4 °C with 150 mM NaCl, 100 mM N-(hydroxylethyl)imidazole catalyst, and 5 mM activated nucleotide. The activated nucleotide hydrolyzed with a rate constant of 0.39 h–1, causing the polymerization reaction to stall before complete template copying could be achieved. These extension rates are more than 1 order of magnitude slower than those for amino-sugar ribonucleotides under the same conditions, and copying of the TNA template, which best represented a true self-copying reaction, was the slowest of all. The poor kinetics of 2′-NH2-TNA template copying could give insight into why TNA was ultimately not used as a genetic material by biological systems.

Chemical Primer Extension: Efficiently Determining Single Nucleotides in DNA

Rapid replication: Non-enzymatic primer extension has previously been studied in the context of prebiotic chemistry, but not for practical applications. Reactions with primers featuring a 3′-amino-2′,3′-dideoxynucleotide can be rapid and selective for all four templating nucleobases (see scheme). On a chip with immobilized capture strands, 500 fmol of template suffice for single-nucleotide determinations within 2.7 h.