Importance of Oligonucleotides in DNA and RNA Expression Research

Over the last few decades, molecular biology has revolutionized a lot. And, the most common and critical component researchers have constantly used for DNA and RNA expression research is oligonucleotide. For both RNA and DNA, it's the monomeric element. According to a recent study, biomedicine and biological research wouldn't be at the stage where they are now. In fact, DNA and RNA oligonucleotide synthesis have been proven to be the key to different molecular biology processes, from DNA sequencing to PCR to plasmid construction, genomic manipulation and labeled probes.

Do you wonder why? Keep reading!

Why Is Oligonucleotide a Key Component for DNA and RNA Expression Research?

If it's your first time in DNA or RNA expression research, let's start with what oligonucleotide is.

Well, oligonucleotides are comparatively short single-stranded sequences of nucleotides. However, although the typical oligos for research should be from 5 to 50 bp, these oligonucleotides can be up to 100 bp, allowing a small percentage of DNAs to research. In fact, it's possible to study RNAs by designing oligos.

Now, let's talk about why they are important for biological research, like DNA and RNA expression.

Sequence specificity and complementarity are the prime oligo properties, allowing researchers to identify chemical recognition among nucleotide bases to align specific pairs with each other through hydrogen bonds to form double-stranded molecules. For RNA, it's adenine (A), guanine (G), uracil (U) and cytosine (C), and for DNA, the set remains the same except for thymine (T), replacing uracil (U).

Oligonucleotides used in biological research come the following:

Oligo primer use in PCR

PCR (polymerase chain reaction) is a process to amplify several copies of a specific DNA sequence rapidly from one sample. DNA polymerase needs forward and backward primers to amplify the target DNA to create double-stranded DNA components. Oligonucleotide primers are designed to align with targeted complementary sequences. Make sure you consider annealing and melting temperature!

DNA sequencing

The use of oligonucleotide primers is not limited to just PCR but plays a great role in DNA sequencing. It has the same requirements as the previous one, such as sequencing specificity, annealing and melting temperatures, and hybridization region. However, the set of parameters is different here due to the various conditions of the polymerase reaction.

Plasmid construction

Biological researchers these days use Oligonucleotides for constructing plasmids, naturally occurring DNA molecules in microorganisms and bacteria, used as a medium to transfer genetic information into cells. Also, there are other ways to construct and employ plasmids containing Oligonucleotides, such as recombinant DNA and RNA sequence expression and replication and gene regulatory sequence characterization. Besides this, the insertion of Oligonucleotides is used into a gene for genome manipulation.

Furthermore, Oligonucleotides have wide use in identifying RNA and DNA sequencing as probes and in other cases, for example:

• Aptamers
• Antisense Oligonucleotides
• Molecular barcodes
• Gene expression analysis

In Conclusion

So, if you are looking for DNA or RNA Oligonucleotide synthesis services for your expression research, count on us. At Bio Basic, we offer oligonucleotide synthesizing for different research applications, including modifications, from probes to modified bases to Linkers and much more.