Improved force fields for the simulations of structural and thermal dynamics of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) complexes with natural nucleic acids

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is a synthetic DNA analog with the phosphate backbone replaced by the N-(2-aminoethyl)-glycine units. Even though the PNA backbone resembles the neutral peptide backbone, the PNA is structurally similar to DNA or RNA. Thus, PNA oligomers, obeying the Watson-Crick base pairing rules, form stable duplexes and triplexes with DNA and RNA. Since PNA is a