Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the means to attach different modified biomolecules through their unique functional
group. The functional groups found in biological systems provide a wide range of
potential interactions with nanostructure surfaces, which can easily interfere with
the structure and function of biomolecules. Most common types of bioconjugation
reactions include coupling of lysine amino acid residues through amine-reactive
succinimidyl esters, cysteine residues through sulfhydryl-reactive maleimide, tyro-
sine residues through electrophilic aromatic substitutions, and modification of the
N- and C-terminus (Francis and Carrico
2010
; Kalia and Raines
2010
;
Stephanopoulos and Francis
2011
). These chemical reactions generally lack
chemoselectivity and efficiency due to their overdependence on the presence of
native amino acid residues, which are usually present in large quantities that may
hinder selectivity. Need of the hour is to develop the chemical strategy that can
efficiently attach synthetic molecules specifically to proteins. Conjugation of DNA
with nanoparticles of calcium phosphate, carbon, silica, gold, magnetite, strontium
phosphate, magnesium phosphate, and manganese phosphate has been used for
DNA delivery, which have low toxicity and good storage capacity (Fukumori and
Ichikawa
2006
; Sokolova and Epple
2008
).
Among bionano-conjugates, gold nanoparticles coupled with biomolecules
attracted great attention in the last decade due to their ease of preparation and
conjugation, biocompatibility, good tenability, high stability, etc. Many diverse
simple synthetic methods are available to synthesize nanoparticles and conjugate
with the biomolecules, which can be effectively used as smart delivery systems.
Varied biomolecules may be synthetic or natural and they can be tailored to
functionalize synthesized nanoparticles. Previous reports have demonstrated
sequence-specific nucleotide interactions, which can affect conjugate behavior. In
the synthesis of DNA nanoparticle conjugates, specific binding of the biomolecules
with greater storage capacity and higher stability is a greater challenge.
10.2.1 Nanoparticles and Vectors
Now-a-days, nanoparticles differing in their elemental composition, size, and shape
can be synthesized. Nanoparticles were tried for bioconjugation with the nucleic
acids due to their unique electronic, optical, and catalytic properties (He et al.
2003
;
Murray et al.
2004
; Masala and Seshadri
2004
; Jason et al.
2004
; Patil et al.
2005
;
Fukumori and Ichikawa
2006
). Nanomaterials exhibit novel properties due to large
surface area to volume ratio. He et al. (
2003
) reported the shielding of embedded
DNA sequences by nanoparticle due to their small size with greater surface area and
pore structure.
Genetic transformation allows the transfer of a foreign gene of interest (trans-
gene) encoding the trait into the plant cell, in order to introduce a desired trait to a
crop. Gene vectors play many important roles in genetic transformations which
need to be constructed in order to transfer the gene of interest. Vector consists of a
cassette which includes the genes of interest, flanked by the necessary controlling
