Hi Aayush,
I'm familiar with SELEX, but aptamers are generally applied to things
like carbohydrate polymers, or surfaces, or the like. For RNA, the best
"aptamer", especially if your goal is to block IRES, is simply the
reverse complement.
That may be my opinion, but you'll notice that few people use SELEX for
RNA or DNA targeting unless they are building peptide aptamers for
conjugation to another protein. If the goal is merely to bind and
obscure a target site, use RNA or DNA reverse complement.
May I suggest looking into the use of trans-acting ribozymes
targeted at IRES? IIRC, there are some in the literature (derived from
hammerhead ribozyme I think?) which act as one-shot "restriction
ribozymes", and can cleave another RNA molecule according to their
affinity to it, base-pairing-wise. If I'm not mistaken you could apply
these to create a trivial anti-IRES that permanently cleaves viral RNA.
On Thu, 8 Aug 2013 00:07:32 -0700 (PDT)
Aayush Aggarwal <
aggar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Cathal,
>
> Actually, we are trying to block IRES(Internal Ribosomal Entry Site),
> so that it silences the viral infection.
> Also,we are looking for DNA or peptide based aptamers as RNA
> aptamers are difficult to handle because of their stability and
> structure. Yes it's the reverse complementary to IRES sequence,but
> designing an aptamer for particular sequence is different and it is
> done using
> SELEX<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_evolution_of_ligands_by_exponential_enrichment> .