DNAzymes: Synthetic Enzymes Made of DNA

The development of the “in vitro selection” technique in the early 1990s has led to the isolation of many DNAzymes—man-made single-stranded DNA molecules with catalytic abilities—from synthetic random-sequence DNA pools. This chapter serves to introduce this class of synthetic enzymes. Although DNAzymes have been derived to catalyze a diverse range of chemical reactions, we will exclusively focus on RNA-cleaving DNAzymes, the best studied class …