“Highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART)” is currently the standard treatment for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This treatment consists of a cocktail of two reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors and a protease inhibitor. Despite the success of this regimen, there is a con ...
The aptamer technology has been introduced in the early 1990s. With this technique ligands for organic dyes and proteins have been identified in many research field, providing various inhibitory molecules that allow functional interference in biological systems. Aptamers can the ...
Conditional gene expression systems are important tools to identify the function of essential genes or in terms of gene therapy approaches. Small molecule-binding aptamers can be used for efficient control of gene expression by inserting them into the 5’ untranslated region of an mRNA with ...
Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids or peptides that can bind target molecules with high affinity and specificity. The conformation of an aptamer usually changes upon binding to its target analyte, and this property has been used in a wide variety of sensing applications, including ...
The immobilization procedure to a biosensor surface has a major influence on the measurement results. To characterize the immobilization onto various biolayers, the interaction of DNA anti-thrombin aptamer with the protein thrombin was used as a model system. The aptamer was immobili ...
In this chapter we present the methods developed in our laboratory for in vivo imaging of oligonucleotidic aptamers. These methods relate to (i) the labelling of aptamers with fluorine-18, a positron emitter, (ii) Positron Emission Tomography imaging of laboratory animals with aptamers ...
Random sequence nucleic acid pools can be used in a variety of applications, including the selection of functional nucleic acids such as protein binding sites, aptamers, and ribozymes. While the design, synthesis, and purification of pools is relatively straightforward, keeping track ...
Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids that bind specifically to a target molecule and thus often inhibit target-associated biological functions. Aptamers have been described for a series of target molecules including peptides, proteins, and even living cells. Besides RNA and ...
In vitro selection techniques offer powerful and versatile methods to isolate nucleic acid sequences with specific activities from huge libraries. The present protocol describes an in vitro selection strategy for the de novo selection of allosteric self-cleaving ribozymes resp ...
SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) is a process for isolating DNA or RNA sequences with high affinity and selectivity for molecular targets from random sequence libraries. These sequences are commonly referred to as aptamers. The process typically re ...
Oligonucleotides complementary to RNA sequences interact poorly with folded target regions. In vitro selection of oligonucleotides carried out against RNA structures have led to aptamers that frequently differ from antisense sequences, but rather take advantage of non-doub ...
Many signalling proteins involved in diverse functions such as cell growth and differentiation can act as oncogenes and cause cellular transformation. These molecules represent attractive targets for cancer diagnosis or therapy and therefore are subject to intensive investi ...
RNA sequences fold in a hierarchical manner to form complex structures. This folding pathway proceeds first with formation of secondary structure elements followed by the compilation of tertiary contacts. Although bioinformatics-based tools are commonly used to predict secon ...
Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (Bacia and Schwille (2007) Nat. Protoc. 2, 2842–2856) reveals molecular mobilities, enabling to identify molecular interactions based on a change of diffusion times (Rigler and Elson, (2001) Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy: The ...
Structural biology plays a central role in gaining a full understanding of the myriad roles of RNA in biology. In recent years, innovative approaches in RNA purification and crystallographic methods have lead to the visualization of an increasing number of unique structures, providing n ...
Cell physiology depends on a fine-tuned network of protein–protein interactions, and misguided interactions are often associated with various diseases. Consequently, peptides, which are able to specifically interfere with such adventitious interactions, are of high inter ...
The peptide aptamer approach employs high-throughput selection to identify members of a randomized peptide library displayed from a scaffold protein by virtue of their interaction with a target molecule. Extending this approach, we have developed a peptide aptamer scaffold prote ...
In vitro genetic approaches are powerful solutions to the protein design problem. mRNA display is an in vitro selection technique enabling the design of peptide and protein ligands ranging from one to over 100 amino acids. Libraries containing more than 10 trillion unique sequences can be syn ...
Peptide aptamers are small recombinant proteins typically inserted into a supportive protein scaffold. These short peptide domains can bind to their target proteins with high specificity and affinity, often resulting in an altered target protein. We describe high-throughput pro ...
Peptide aptamers have primarily been used as research tools to manipulate protein function and study regulatory networks. However, they also find multiple applications in therapeutic research, from target identification and validation to drug discovery. Because of their unbia ...

