ABSTRACT
The ability of RNA to self-assemble into a variety of nanostructures and nanomachines is increasingly being exploited by researchers and is popularly emerging as a new research area called RNA nanotechnology (Rossi 2011; Guo 2010). The idea of RNA nanotechnology is often defined as the design and creation of new RNA structures on a scale less than 100 nm for technological purposes (Guo 2010). The critical features that make RNA more useful for creating structures than other materials such as proteins are that the folding of nucleic acids is dictated by simple and well-understood base-pairing rules and they form various loops and diverse thermodynamically stable structures in a highly programmable and predictable fashion (Guo 2010; Rossi 2011). Furthermore, unlike DNA molecules that mainly rely on canonical Watson and Crick base pairing, RNA molecules also possess noncanonical base pairing, which promotes formation of different stable structural domains distinct from those of DNA. Typically, RNA nanostructures are simple to design and manipulate with a level of simplicity characteristic of DNA, but at the same time exhibiting phenomenal flexibility in structure and diversity in function akin to that of proteins (Guo 2010). Therefore, RNAs are particularly attractive as a building block for
CONTENTS
28.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................545 28.2 RNAi Mechanism ..............................................................................................................546 28.3 Challenges of Classical siRNA Therapeutics .................................................................547 28.4 RNA Nanoparticles ...........................................................................................................548
