Reductive Alkylation and Sequential Reductive Alkylation-Click Chemistry for On-Solid-Support Modification of Pyrrolidinyl Peptide Nucleic Acid

A methodology for the site-specific attachment of fluorophores to the backbone of pyrrolidinyl peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) with an α/β-backbone derived from d-prolyl-(1<i>S</i>,2<i>S</i>)-2-aminocyclopentanecarboxylic acid (acpcPNA) has been developed. The strategy involves a postsynthetic reductive alkylation of the aldehyde-containing labels onto the acpcPNA that was previously modified with (3<i>R</i>,4<i>S</i>)-3-aminopyrrolidine-4-carboxylic acid on the solid support. The reductive alkylation reaction is remarkably efficient and compatible with a range of reactive functional groups including Fmoc-protected amino, azide, and alkynes. This allows further attachment of readily accessible carboxyl-, alkyne-, or azide-containing labels via amide bond formation or Cu-catalyzed azide–alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC, also known as click chemistry). The label attached in this way does not negatively affect the affinity and specificity of the pairing of the acpcPNA to its DNA target. Applications of this methodology in creating self-reporting pyrene- and thiazole orange-labeled acpcPNA probes that can yield a change in fluorescence in response to the presence of the correct DNA target have also been explored. A strong fluorescence enhancement was observed with thiazole orange-labeled acpcPNA in the presence of DNA. The specificity could be further improved by enzymatic digestion with S1 nuclease, providing a 9- to 60-fold fluorescence enhancement with fully complementary DNA and a less than 3.5-fold enhancement with mismatched DNA targets

Hydrophilic and Cell-Penetrable Pyrrolidinyl Peptide Nucleic Acid via Post-synthetic Modification with Hydrophilic Side Chains

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is a nucleic acid mimic in which the deoxyribose–phosphate was replaced by a peptide-like backbone. The absence of negative charge in the PNA backbone leads to several unique behaviors including a stronger binding and salt independency of the PNA–DNA duplex stability. However, PNA possesses poor aqueous solubility and cannot directly penetrate cell membranes. These are major obstacles that limit in vivo applications of PNA. In previous strategies, the PNA can be conjugated to macromolecular carriers or modified with positively charged side chains such as guanidinium groups to improve the aqueous solubility and cell permeability. In general, a preformed modified PNA monomer was required. In this study, a new approach for post-synthetic modification of PNA backbone with one or more hydrophilic groups was proposed. The PNA used in this study was the conformationally constrained pyrrolidinyl PNA with prolyl-2-aminocyclopentanecarboxylic acid dipeptide backbone (acpcPNA) that shows several advantages over the conventional PNA. The aldehyde modifiers carrying different linkers (alkylene and oligo­(ethylene glycol)) and end groups (−OH, −NH₂, and guanidinium) were synthesized and attached to the backbone of modified acpcPNA by reductive alkylation. The hybrids between the modified acpcPNAs and DNA exhibited comparable or superior thermal stability with base-pairing specificity similar to those of unmodified acpcPNA. Moreover, the modified apcPNAs also showed the improvement of aqueous solubility (10–20 folds compared to unmodified PNA) and readily penetrate cell membranes without requiring any special delivery agents. This study not only demonstrates the practicality of the proposed post-synthetic modification approach for PNA modification, which could be readily applied to other systems, but also opens up opportunities for using pyrrolidinyl PNA in various applications such as intracellular RNA sensing, specific gene detection, and antisense and antigene therapy