'Chemical nose' which are able to 'sniff' diffrences in DNA structures

Credit: Richard Hooley/UCR

A huge part of diagnosing diseases is, of course, detecting the thing, obviously, so if we are able to detect, say cancer cells, that can enhance our drug development and cancer research by a lot, now the small changes which occur in the structure of DNA are involved in breast cancer and other diseases, but it's not as easy as said, they have been extremely difficult to detect, so what can do that?

"Chemical nose" as it's called, is able to "smell" when bits of DNA folds in an unusual way. The UC Riverside chemists were able to do so and published it in the journal Nature Chemistry. 

Wenwan Zhong, the study author, and UCR chemistry professor said, "If a DNA sequence is folded, it could prevent the transcription of a gene linked to that particular piece of DNA"

This could have positive and negative effects as either it can affect by silencing the gene with the potential to cause cancer or promote tumors or potentially keep viral proteins from being produced which will affect the immune response. And to detect these folds UCR organic chemistry professor Richard Hooley and his colleagues modified a concept which, when modified to target to look for any kind of molecule. The concept was previously used to sense other things, like chemical components in different vintages of wine, the chemicals in the system could be designed to detect any kind of molecule. Hooley's team added extra non-standard components that could allow the nose to sniff out its DNA target.

Hooley says that system is comparable to that of the human nose, as we detect an odor or smell when we inhale air containing odor molecule that binds to multiple receptors inside the nose which lets us smell and detect the odor, and their system also has multiple receptors which are able to interact with the DNA folds. The Chemical nose is composed of a host molecule, fluorescent guest molecule, and DNA, which is the target. When the desired folds are present, the gust molecule glows, by which scientists are able to detect the presence in the sample.

Credit: Richard Hooley/UCR

G-quadruplex

Sometimes the Guanine-rich regions of DNA fold in a different manner which creates a G-quadruplex, parts of the genome that forms these quadruplex are very complex, but UCR researchers discovered that their folds are known to regulate gene expression and they play a key role in keeping cells health as they found out by using YY1 protein, Yin Yang1, which regulated gene expression by interacting directly with quadruplex DNA in gene promoters and by bringing remote quadruplex structures into close proximity of gene promoters, which provided insights into the functions of YY1 and quadruplex structures promoting healthy cells operations. YY1 is known to regulate genes related to Cancer, and cancer cells also have increased numbers of quadruplex DNA structures. 

Now, having done so, they will try to build on their success, as they said they will be doing more research on other three-dimensional structures of DNA. The researchers will examine how forces that damage DNA affect the ways it folds and also will be studying RNA.