Mass-Spectrometric Monitoring of a PNA-Based Ligation Reaction for the Multiplex Detection of DNA Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms

An abasic-site-forming ligation reaction might allow multiplex analysis of single-base mutations to be performed in homogeneous solution. The ligation strategy capitalizes upon the use of the non-ionic DNA-analogue peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) and combines the highly sequence-selective base pairing of short-length PNA with its ease and accuracy of detection by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry.