Research description: Nanobiotechnology has broad application in medicine and health, it has shown great prospective future in related industry. Many developed countries have made it a priority in their centennial scientific research plan and related projects are supported with more weight as compared to others. DNA/RNA and protein/peptide are two most widely used and the most important building blocks in the field of nanobiotechnology. Due to their physicochemical properties, these nanostructures may have some drawbacks. For example, they can be degraded by some enzymes within cells.

PNA is an artificially synthetic DNA analogue. The nanostructures from PNA gain the advantages of both DNA/RNA- and protein/peptide-based nanostructures, more importantly, unfavorable properties from either disappear in PNA-based nanostructures. Based on the above research background, we have explored a method for efficient synthesis of PNA monomers. Then we synthesized several PNA chains from our synthesized PNA monomers. The PNA chains were designed to produce some representative PNA nanostructures. These structures are expected to have important potential applications.