For experiments requiring custom-designed, LNA-enhanced oligonucleotides

Features

Customize your own LNA oligonucleotides

Use your own design or let QIAGEN's LNA experts design them for you

Select from a wide range of labels and modifications

Benefit from the easy-to-use online design tool

Product Details

Custom LNA Oligonucleotides are ideal for studies involving short or very similar sequences. The high affinity of an LNA-enhanced oligonucleotide to its complementary sequence results in dramatically improved specificity and sensitivity, when compared with traditional DNA or RNA oligos. In many cases, LNA-enhanced oligonucleotides can be used to distinguish between sequences differing by only a single nucleotide, a feature that can be critical for the success of many experiments.

Need a quote for your research project or would you like to discuss your project with our specialist team? Just contact us!

For Custom LNA Oligonucleotide Large Scale and Custom LNA Oligonucleotide Manual Design, please contact us for ordering and for further information, or email our Support Team directly.

Performance

LNA oligonucleotides exhibit unprecedented thermal stability when hybridized to a complementary DNA or RNA strand. For each incorporated LNA monomer, the melting temperature (Tm) of the duplex increases by 2–8°C. In addition, LNA oligonucleotides can be made shorter than traditional DNA or RNA oligonucleotides and still retain a high Tm. This is important when the oligonucleotide is used to detect small or highly similar targets.

Since LNA oligonucleotides typically consist of a mixture of LNA and DNA or RNA, it is possible to optimize the sensitivity and specificity by varying the LNA content of the oligonucleotide. Incorporation of LNA into oligonucleotides has been shown to improve sensitivity and specificity for many hybridization-based technologies including PCR, microarrays and in situ hybridization (ISH).

Tm normalization enables robust detection, regardless of GC content. The Tm of a nucleotide duplex can be controlled by varying the LNA content. This feature can be used to normalize the Tm across a population of short sequences with varying GC content. For AT-rich nucleotides, which give low melting temperatures, more LNA is incorporated into the LNA oligonucleotide to raise the Tm of the duplex. This enables the design of LNA oligonucleotides with a narrow Tm range, which is beneficial in many research applications such as microarrays, PCR and other applications in which sensitive and specific binding to many different targets must occur under the same conditions simultaneously. The power of Tm normalization is demonstrated by the comparison of DNA and LNA probes for detection of miRNA targets with a range of CG content .

Principle

Use the guidelines below when designing your own Custom LNA Oligonucleotides:

LNA will bind very tightly to other LNA residues. Avoid self-complementarity and cross-hybridization to other LNA-containing oligonucleotides

Keep the GC content between 30–60%

Avoid stretches of more than 4 LNA bases, except when very short (9–10 nucleotides) oligonucleotides are designed

Avoid stretches of 3 or more Gs or Cs

For novel applications, design guidelines may have to be established empirically

Applications

LNA oligonucleotides can be successfully used in a wide range of applications, including:

miRNA research

Small RNA research

SNP genotyping

mRNA antisense oligonucleotides

Allele-specific PCR

RNAi

DNAzymes

Fluorescence polarization probes

Molecular beacons

Microarray gene expression profiling

Gene repair/exon skipping

Splice variant detection

Comparative genome hybridization (CGH)