Back to results
US 9,315,862 B2Granted
Aptamer regulated nucleic acids and uses thereof
AssigneeCalifornia Institute of Technology
InventorsChristina D. Smolke, Travis S. Bayer
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
The invention relates to trans-acting ligand-responsive nucleic acids and uses thereof. In particular, a ligand responsive nucleic acid comprises an effector domain and an aptamer domain that is responsive to a ligand.
Claims20
A nucleic acid comprising (i) a substrate sequence that can form a hairpin RNA stem as a substrate for an RNaseIII family nuclease, and (ii) an aptamer that binds to a ligand, wherein said aptamer comprises a sequence that can form an aptamer stem, the formation of said aptamer stem competes with the formation of said hairpin RNA stem,
- wherein binding of the ligand to said aptamer causes a conformational change to render the substrate sequence non-functional by destabilizing the hairpin RNA stem, through stabilizing the aptamer stem, and,
- wherein said RNaseIII family nuclease processes said hairpin RNA through an RNA interference (RNAi) mechanism in attenuating expression of a target gene.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.