Abstract
Antisense agents are very attractive for research and therapeutics development because they offer possibilities to inhibit any gene using simple design rules. In practice, however, antisense design is very difficult and clinical progress has been only sporadic. Fortunately, new nucleic acid analogs and mimics such as peptide nucleic acid (PNA) have been developed and these greatly improve the prospects for therapeutic development (1). In this chapter we describe antisense PNAs that inhibit bacterial genes. This area of antisense technology attracts relatively little attention (2–6), however, bacteria are accessible to antisense inhibition and PNA chemistry in particular gives some important advantages (7). There are strong motivations to pursue this work, including the need for new types of antimicrobials for medicine and also research needs for flexible tools for genetic analyses of diverse bacteria. So far, our attempts to develop antisense PNAs for bacteria have been very encouraging (2–4).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Toulme J. J. (2001) New candidates for true antisense. Nat. Biotechnol. 19, 17–18.
Good L. and Nielsen P. E. (1998) Antisense inhibition of gene expression in bacteria by PNA targeted to mRNA, Nat. Biotechnol. 16, 355.
Good L. and Nielsen P. E. (1998) Inhibition of translation and bacterial growth by peptide nucleic acid targeted to ribosomal RNA, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 95, 2073–2076.
Good L., Awasthi S. K., Dryselius R., Larsson O., and Nielsen P. E. (2001) Bactericidal antisense effects of peptide-PNA conjugates. Nat. Biotechnol. 19, 360–364.
Harth G., Zamecnik P. C., Tang J. Y., Tabatadze D., and Horwitz M. A. (2000) Treatment of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with antisense oligonucleotides to glutamine synthetase mRNA inhibits glutamine synthetase activity, formation of the poly-L-glutamate/ glutamine cell wall structure, and bacterial replication. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 97, 418–423.
White D. G., Maneewannakul K., von Hofe E., Zillman M., Eisenberg W., Field A. K., and Levy S. B. (1997) Inhibition of the multiple antibiotic resistance (mar) operon in Escherichia coli by antisense DNA analogs, Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 41, 2699–2704.
Nielsen P. E. (2001) Peptide nucleic acids as antibacterial agents via the antisense principle, Exp. Opin Invest. Drugs] 10, 331–341.
Nikaido H. (1994) Prevention of drug access to bacterial targets: permeability barriers and active efflux, Science 264, 382–388.
Good L., Sandberg R., Larsson O., Nielsen P. E., and Wahlestedt C. (2000) Antisense PNA effects in escherichia coli are limited by the outer-membrane LPS layer. Microbiology 146, 2665–2670.
Haaima G., Lohse A., Buchardt O., and Nielsen P. E. (1996) Peptide nucleic acids (PNA) containing thymine monomers derived from chiral amino acids: hybridization and solubility properties of d-lysine PNA. Angewandte Chem. 35, 1939–1941.
Myers K. J. and Dean N. M. (2000) Sensible use of antisense: how to use oligonucleotides as research tools. Trends Pharmacol. Sci. 21, 19–23.
Shine J. and Dalgarno L. (1974) The 3′-terminal sequence of Escherichia coli 16S ribosomal RNA: complementarity to nonsense triplets and ribosome binding sites. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 71, 1342–1346.
Osada Y., Saito R., and Tomita M. (1999) Analysis of base-pairing potentials between 16S rRNA and 5′ UTR for translation initiation in various prokaryotes. Bioinformatics 15, 578–581.
Wagner E. G. and Simons R. W. (1994) Antisense RNA control inbacteria, phages, and plasmids. Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 48, 713–742.
Lovett P. S. (1996) Translation attenuation regulation of chloramphenicolresistance in bacteria: a review. Gene 179, 157–162.
Giesen U., Kleider W., Berding C., Geiger A., Orum H., and Nielsen P. E. (1998) A formula for thermal stability (Tm) prediction of PNA/DNA duplexes. Nucleic Acids Res. 26, 5004–5006.
Altschul S. F., Gish W., Miller W., Myers E. W., and Lipman D. J.(1990) Basic local alignment search tool. J. Mol. Biol. 215, 403–410.
Amsterdam D. (1996) Susceptibility testing of antimicrobials in liquid media, in Antibiotics in Laboratory Medicine, (eiLorian V., ed.), Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, pp. 52–111.
Miller J. H. (1972) Experiments in Molecular Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Humana Press Inc.
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Good, L. (2002). Antisense Inhibition of Bacterial Gene Expression and Cell Growth. In: Nielsen, P.E. (eds) Peptide Nucleic Acids. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 208. Springer, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1385/1-59259-290-2:237
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1385/1-59259-290-2:237
Publisher Name: Springer, Totowa, NJ
Print ISBN: 978-0-89603-976-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-59259-290-6
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols