Effect of backbone-modification of oligodeoxyribonucleic acid on primer extension reactions

Abstract

We synthesized two types of modified DNA templates in which the phosphodiester linkage was replaced with an amide-type linker [-CH(2)C=ONH-] or an amine-type linker [-CH(2)CH(2)NH-]. Primer extension reactions were performed using these modified DNA templates to investigate the effect of backbone modification on polymerase reactions. Our results indicated that the polymerase reaction was affected much more by the insertion of the cationic flexible amine-type linker than by insertion of the neutral rigid amide-type linker.