aptamer
nounUS /ˈæpt.əˌmɚ/
Etymology From Latin aptus (“apt, proper”) + -mer (from Ancient Greek μέρος (méros, “part, portion”); compare mero-).
1
Biochemistry, Biology, Chemistry, Genetics, Medicine, Microbiology, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Any subsequence of nucleic acid, selected from a large random sequence-pool, used to bind to a specific target molecule.
- Aptamers are oligomers of RNA or DNA that spontaneously fold into specific three-dimensional shapes that can bind defined targets. The specificity of the shape of the binding site arises from the base sequence of the aptamer, which determines the base-pairing pattern of the oligomer.2005, (US) National Research Council, Sensor Systems for Biological Agent Attacks, page 117:
- 2009, Corinne Ravelet, Eric Peyrin, Chapter 10: Aptamers in Affinity Separations: Stationary Separation, Yingfu Li, Yi Lu (editors), Functional Nucleic Acids for Analytical Applications, page 271, The use of DNA or RNA aptamers as tools in analytical chemistry is a very promising field of research because of their capabilities to bind specifically the target molecules with an affinity similar to that of antibodies.
2 more examples
- The field of aptamer research is also more targeted, with many more catalytic aptamers being examined rather than for binding alone.2010, Dabid Loakes, “Nucleotides an Nucleic Acids; Oligo- and Polynucleotides”, in D. W. Allen, J. C. Tebby, John C. Tebby, David Loakes, editors, Organophosphorus Chemistry, page 144:
- 2015, Caroli J et al, "APTANI: a computational tool to select aptamers through sequence-structure motif analysis of HT-SELEX data", Bioinformatics, 32 (2): 161-164, "3 Results". To test APTANI performances and validate its findings, we analyzed a sequence library corresponding to an HT-SELEX experiment designed to isolate aptamers specific for murine IL4Ra (Roth et al., 2012).
- Derived terms
- aptameric, aptasensor, thioaptamer