fairfolio
Saved Projects

Protein Interface Targeted Aptamers Screened Using Competitive Selection

ISEF · 2016 Fourth Award

Shinde, Pushkar

Overview

Nucleic acid aptamers are single stranded DNA or RNA that bind targets ranging from large biomolecules to small chemicals, with affinities and specificities emulating antibodies, and provide exciting prospects for basic science and therapeutic applications. This project sought to use a site specific aptamer evolution protocol, to tailor aptamers to a less conserved region of furin, a proprotein convertase (PC) in a large protease family implicated in a plethora of biological and pathological processes. Furin immobilization, stringency of aptamer binding and elution, strand separation and purification, and PCR amplification methods were first standardized. After several iterations of selection, the enriched aptamers were cloned and sequenced. Statistical analysis suggests that after four iterations of selection, the aptamer pool is purine enriched (p=0.006) with notable site-specific enrichments. Preliminary analyses suggest that selected aptamers display affinity, in the micromolar to nanomolar range, for the targeted interface, and further biochemical analysis continues.

Awards (1)

Competition history

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google