FAQ

PNA Bio is the only legitimate provider of custom PNA oligomers in America, as a distributor of Panagene. As a dedicated provider of custom PNA oligomers, Panagene holds patented technologies that guarantee the best qualtiy PNA products.

Backbone of PNA is methylene carbonyl bonds as in peptides. Since PNA contains no charged phosphate groups, the binding between PNA/DNA is stronger than between DNA/DNA due to the lack of electrostatic repulsion. In addition, PNA is resistant to DNases and proteases, and is stable at wide ranges of pH and salt concentration.

PNAs are characterized by both HPLC and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. PNA probes are typically greater than 95%.

PNA has high affinity and specificity to target nucleic acid. Also it is resistant to nucleases and proteases and therefore can last in cells for a long time. For example, PNA miRNA inhibitors show the effect up to 14 days in cells.

For fluorescence tags, Cy3, Cy5, FITC, FAM (6-carboxyfluorescein), TAMRA, Texas red, Thiazol Orange, JOE, ATTO425, BHQ-1, Dabcyl, OregonGreen, AlexaFluor, ATOO550 are most popular. Other tags such as biotin, DIG are also available. Please inquire if you need other specific needs.

PNA oligo cannot be used as PCR primers because PNAs do not contain a hydroxyl group and do not act as a substrate for DNA polymerase.

PNA clamp is designed to resolve a slight differences in target sequence such as single base mismatch. Tighter and more specific binding of PNA oligomers to the template than the DNA primer suppresses the amplification of perfect match in PCR.

PANArray can be used to detect different alleles of viruses for treatment of patients who are infected with various viruses. PNA Bio offers the PANArray products to detect HPV and HBV alleles. This technique can also be utilized for miRNA profiling.

ZFNs are engineered DNA-cleaving enzymes that consist of site-specific DNA-binding zinc-finger arrays and the nuclease domain of the restriction endonuclease, FokI. ZFNs always function as dimers and thus often are referred to as ZFN pairs.

TAL (transcription activator like) effectors, referred as TALEs, are transcription activators secreted by plant bacteria Zanthomonas. Because there are four different modules each of which recognizes specific DNA bases in TALEs, it is possible to engineer TALEs that specifically bind to a desired DNA sequence. Engineered TAL effectors can be fused to the cleavage domain of FokI to create TAL effector nucleases (TALENs). Such nucleases can function as a site-specific endonuclease cleaving the target sequence in genome, which allows various types of genomic engineering such as gene knockout and gene knock-in.

When introduced in the cells,engineered nucleases (EN) can induce sequence specific double-strand breaks (DSBs), which, in turn, stimulate two major DSB repair processes of the cell, namely homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end joining (NHEJ). Due to the error-prone nature of NHEJ process, a subset of DSBs repaired by NHEJ will contain small insertions or deletions of few nucleotides (Indels).

We have proprietary algorithm to design zinc finger or TALE domains. From the computer aided design, about 30 will be tested in cells using reporter gene assay for its specific cleavage and high efficiency to choose the final cancidate.

Our reporter plasmid contains GFP in out of frame that becomes in frame by recombination event carried by active recombination event. By selecting the cells with GFP expression, the chance to find a cell with recombination improves 10~50 fold.

Yes, ZFN has been shown to work in many organisms such as mouse, rat, human, pig, plant, and zebrafish.