INV-18071
DNA and RNA structural analysis provides useful information for drug discovery, disease diagnosis, and clinical research. Currently, used detection techniques include liquid chromatography‑mass spectrometry (LC/MS), antibody-based tests such as ELISA and Ames tests. However, these tests are time-consuming, expensive, less accurate, less sensitive, and require multiple runs to obtain all the information. Also, in MS analysis the molecular fragmentation leads to noise in the data. Our researchers aim to resolve these issues with the novel satellite‑MALDI technique.
The innovation involves the detection of small modifications (at the nucleotide level) in the nucleic acid by directly subjecting the isolated samples to MALDI‑MS in time‑of‑flight (TOF) mode. The pulsed UV laser to cleave the DNA adducts from the mismatched DNA segment or modified bases from the RNA loop region, the separated nucleotides are detected in high‑resolution MS. These modified bases give peaks in the low mass range, referred to as “satellite peaks”. This technique provides a method for rapid and accurate detection of polar and nonpolar adducts.