Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (spions) and peptide nucleic acids (pna): new nanostructured metal conjugated systems

Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNA) are mimics of natural oligonucleotides (DNA and RNA). They bind with excellent affinity and sequence specificity complementary DNA and RNA, and exhibit greater mismatch selectivity and chemical and enzymatic stability than natural oligonucleotides.1 The interest related to nanoparticles and nanostructured metal conjugated systems could open new scenery for the PNA applications in biotechnology and medicine. Superparamagnetic nanoparticles (SPIONS) are attractive because of some peculiar properties such as selective separation of biomolecules and cell,2 automated DNA extraction,3 targeted gene delivery,4 use as magnetic resonance contrast agent (MRI),5 and magnetic field induced hyperthermia for cancer therapy.6 Passive adsorption and/or covalent binding to the outer particle surface hydroxyl groups, allow easy support for biomolecules. In this poster some of the synthetic methodologies set up to prepare 10 mer-nanoconjugates of PNA with SPIONS, characterization of products, and attempts to assess their hybridization with complementary DNA are described.