S. Broitman et al., Repairing the sickle cell mutation - I. Specific covalent binding of a photoreactive third strand to the mutated base pair, J BIOL CHEM, 274(31), 1999, pp. 21763-21768
A DNA third strand with a 3'-psoralen substituent was designed to form a tr
ipler with the sequence downstream of the T.A mutant base pair of the human
sickle cell beta-globin gene. Tripler-mediated psoralen modification of th
e mutant T residue was sought as an approach to gene repair. The 24-nucleot
ide purine-rich target sequence switches from one strand to the other and h
as four pyrimidine interruptions. Therefore, a third strand sequence favora
ble to two tripler motifs was used, one parallel and the other antiparallel
to it. To cope with the pyrimidine interruptions, which weaken third stran
d binding, 5-methylcytosine and 5-propynyluracil were used in the third str
and. Further, a six residue "hook" complementary to an overhang of a linear
duplex target was added to the 5'-end of the third strand via a T-4 linker
, In binding to the overhang by Watson-Crick pairing, the hook facilitates
tripler formation. This third strand also binds specifically to the target
within a supercoiled plasmid. The psoralen moiety at the 3'-end of the thir
d strand forms photoadducts to the targeted T with high efficiency. Such mo
noadducts are known to preferentially trigger reversion of the mutation by
DNA repair enzymes.