Thursday, February 2, 2012

The GQW blog has moved

Blogging related to G-quadruplex has moved to this site hosted in WordPress. There will be regular postings by members of my research group and frequent compilations of recent articles in the field. Check it out.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Second International Meeting on QDNA

The Second International Meeting on Quadruplex DNA will be held on April 18-19, 2009. Mark your calendars and register early as the spaces are limited. Further details are shown below:

Friday, February 16, 2007

Book: 'Quadruplex Nucleic Acids'

I just received the book Quadruplex Nucleic Acids yesterday and I must say that it's a great book. Anyone interested in getting a broad overview of almost everything related to G-quadruplexes will find this book useful. It covers everything from structure, energetics, dynamics and biological function to ligand-recognition and supramolecular/nanotech aplications.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Welcome to the G-Quadruplex World!

The purpose of this blog is initially to train myself in the craft of blogging and eventually to make this blog a useful discussion forum for researchers, teachers and students interested in the field of G-quadruplexes. In a nutshell, G-quadruplexes are supramolecular structures formed by the self-assembly of guanine bases. More specifically it consists of planar tetramers of guanine known as tetrads, which in turn stack (usually aided by cation binding) to form higher order structures (view a picture in the previous post). G-quadruplexes are formed by individual guanines (base, nucleoside, nucleotide) or by oligomeric guanines (G-rich oligonucleotides of DNA, RNA or even non-natural PNA). Research in the field of G-quadruplex in the last 10 years has increased dramatically due to its potential implications in diseases such as cancer as well as their use in nanotechnology applications.

My research laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus deals primarily with the synthesis of guanine derivatives and studies of its supramolecular properties. We are currently using such guanine derivatives as scaffolds to construct nanostructures and also to bind to Quadruplex-DNA (QDNA) for medicinal chemistry purposes.

To be continued...

Top view of Quadruplex DNA (NDB ID: 139D)

Notable Quadruplex Articles

Rivera Lab Blog

About Me

San Juan, Puerto Rico
I'm an associate professor of organic chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. The major focus of my research group is to make guanine derivatives that self-assemble into non-natural G-quadruplexes whose supramolecular structures can be modulated towards solving problems in biological chemistry and nanotechnology.