Synthesis and biochemical properties of oligodeoxynucleotides acylated by the chemically stable 2-(trimethylsilyl)benzoyl (TMSBz) group at the 5′ or 3′ terminus

Triazole-linked DNA as a primer surrogate in the synthesis of first-strand cDNA

A phosphate-eliminated nonnatural oligonucleotide serves as a primer surrogate in reverse transcription reaction of mRNA. Despite of the nonnatural triazole linkages in the surrogate, the reverse transcriptase effectively elongated cDNA sequences on the 3'-downstream of the primer by transcription of the complementary sequence of mRNA. A structure-activity comparison with the reference natural oligonucleotides shows the superior priming activity of the surrogate containing triazole-linkages. The nonnatural linkages also protect the transcribed cDNA from digestion reactions with 5'-exonuclease and enable us to remove noise transcripts of unknown origins.