This review describes the application of peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) as clamps that prevent nucleic acid amplification of wild-type DNA so that DNA with mutations may be observed. These methods are useful to detect single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in cases where there is a small amount of mutated DNA relative to the amount of normal (unmutated/wild-type) DNA. Detecting SNPs arising from mutated DNA can be useful to diagnose various genetic diseases, and is especially important in cancer diagnostics for early detection, proper diagnosis, and monitoring of disease progression. Most examples use PNA clamps to inhibit PCR amplification of wild-type DNA to identify the presence of mutated DNA associated with various types of cancer.
Keywords: cancer; peptide nucleic acids (PNAs); polymerase chain reaction (PCR); single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP).