Scientists have developed a new way to mass produce single strand DNA molecules called oligonucleotides, according to a press release from the Karolinska Institutet.
The breakthrough will help aid in the development of new drugs and will benefit DNA nanotechnology.
The method was developed by researchers at the Karolinska Institutet located in Sweden and Harvard University and was described in the journal Nature Methods.
"Many of the recent advances in genetic and molecular biological research and development, such as the ability to quickly scan an organism's genome, would not have been possible without oligonucleotides" the press release stated.
The new method is more versatile than previous DNA production technology, and will help get around some of the problems manufacturers have had in the past.
"We've used enzymatic production methods to create a system that not only improves the quality of the manufactured oligonucleotides but that also makes it possible to scale up production using bacteria in order to produce large amounts of DNA copies cheaply," said co-developer Björn Högberg at the Swedish Medical Nanoscience Center, a branch of the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.
The new system allows manufacturers to produce a large amount of oligonucleotides at a very low cost. With previous methods the longer the DNA strand was the more likely it would be that errors would occur, the new system allows scientists to produce longer strands with several hundred nitrogen bases with less of a chance of error.
"The DNA molecules are first formed as a long string of single-stranded DNA in which the sequence of interest is repeated several times. The long strand forms tiny regions called hairpins, where the strand folds back on itself," according to theKarolinska Institutet. "These hairpins can then be cut up by enzymes, which serve as a molecular-biological pair of scissors that cuts the DNA at selected sites. Several different oligonucleotides can thus be produced at the same time in a perfectly balanced combination, which is important if they are to be crystallised or used therapeutically."
Oligonucleotide-based drugs are already available, and it's very possible that our method could be used to produce purer and cheaper versions of these drugs," said Dr Högberg.
