Wednesday, October 1, 2008

possible reaction for attaching adamantane to 5 prime end of DNA


So don't get me confused with ANY kind of chemist, but I've put together a nice little reaction here for attaching adamantane to a strand of DNA. And I apologize for not providing the usual sexy pictures (I wrote sexy pictures to try to increase my google rank. I totally got that idea from Damian who used "ecstasy" as a keyword in a post<- see what I did there?), but I understand that the above representation is closer to what shows up in journals, not that I'm too worried about that.

and thanks for the comments, Guy. Thoughts on this?

What's the next step? Do some ab initio calculations to try and determine positive reactivity?

MTF

3 comments:

Guy said...

Hold your horses, Chemosabe.

A little play on lone-ranger terminology there.

Are you try to use the adamantane as a tool, or are you trying to deposit it? If the first, then your chemistry is adequate for the moment. But in the second case you will probably want to avoid all sorts of covalent bonding altogether and go with making a DNA "crook" that fits the adamantane and hold it there with electrostatics, van-der-walls or hydrogen bonding. Then use an enzyme or other reactive site to "weld" the adamantane in place.

On a side note, I've been giving thought to a Cartesian coordinate system (akin to that used by reprap http://www.reprap.org for its deposition system) as a significant necessity on the path to MNT.

Nice chem pics, by the way.

Guy said...

Sorry about the Engrish, gotta proof-read more often.

Tom said...

I've been thinking about that too. I did find one paper about sticking adamantane in the major groove. You can just copy and paste that link, trust me.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6THS-45S47K5-5&_user=1111158&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1111158&md5=95c454b3ee659f848cbcab47d6463bc1

Chemosabe, HA!