DNA’s Role In the Production of Oligonucleotides

The study of living organisms incorporates the use of oligonucleotides.

In order to understand what an oligonucleotide is, as well as how important the process of oligo synthesis is to biology, you must first understand the vital roles that DNA play.

DNA’s Role

Deoxyribonucleic acids, or DNA, are essentially one of the building blocks in life. Furthermore, they tend to encode instructions for life’s processes. The structure of DNA is composed of strands that bind them together. Each strand is made out of nucleotides that house the building blocks of DNA, called bases. These bases are adenine, cytosine, guanine, thyamine. Each of these bases contains millions of strands worth of information. This accounts for the massive amounts of diversity in life.

When one strand of DNA binds to another strand, scientists can then use short DNA strands called oligonucleotides, oligos, as research tools. Now, oligos are important tools that work hand-in-hand with DNA. Through the process of researching and binding matching sequences with either DNA or RNA polymers, scientists can use oligos to decode and study the genetic makeup of organisms.

Research Benefits

Scientists often start decoding information by researching the DNA sequence of the targeted organism. Once the DNA sequence has been studied, they can then create an oligo that will be used to perform tasks. One of the advantages of using oligos is that living systems will accept chemically-synthesized DNA taken from an organism. This allows researchers and scientists to further study them as these systems will act as if they are taken directly from an organism.

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