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.
Hopefully this blog will become 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). In the last decade, research in the field of G-quadruplexes 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 recognize DNA-based G-quadruplexes for therapeutic purposes.