bioinformatics designing of 10-23 deoxyribozyme against coding region of beta-galactosidase gene

Background: deoxyribozymes (dzs) can play a role as gene expression inhibitors at mrna level. among dzs, the 10-23 deoxyribozyme has significant potentials for treatment of diseases. designed dz includes a catalytic core made of 15 deoxyribonucleotides and two binding arms consisted of 6-12 nucleotides for site specific binding to target rna and hydrolysis. the enzyme has characteristic features for cleavage of the rna target between an unpaired purine (a, g) and a paired pyrimidine (c or u). in this study, 10-23 dz is designed for the coding region of the α-peptide of a lacz gene. materials and methods: the primary sequence of a plasmid with α-complementation ability was taken from addgene database. to confirm sequence validity, expasy was used to analyze related orfs for the retrieved sequence. the orf with identical sequence to α-peptide was selected in the reverse complement sequence. subsequently, the secondary structure of the α-peptide was analyzed in dinamelt web server and mfold software. then the intended target site was selected inside the coding region of the α-peptide. the dzs sequence was designed for the target site with nucleotide binding arms. results and conclusion: the resulted dz in this study can be used as a promising catalytic dna inside bacterial cells for blue-white screening. criteria such as biological stability and catalytic rate of such enzymes must be evaluated in vivo and in vitro.