This paper is related to fragment-based drug discovery in that fragments which are effective at binding the target can be connected by a linker of appropriate length to increase affinity and specificity. The goal of this research was to determine which combinations of linker length and distance between base pairs of hairpin RNA yielded the highest affinity and selectivity. This strategy may best be applied to RNA targets, but the general principles could be extended to protein targets.
This paper is interesting showing that the distance between the ligands affect binding affinity and selectivity with RNA. Hopefully this research can lead on to understanding the non-perfect complimentary binding of microRNAs to their 3'-UTR regions.
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