Stereo-gecontroleerde synthese van artificiële genetische systemen met gemodificeerde suikerfosfaat ruggengraat

Nucleic acids have evolved over billions of years into molecules that combine chemical simplicity with exceptional functional complexity to support all life on earth. Expanding this natural repertoire through chemical modification has greatly increased their structural diversity and enabled novel applications beyond their biological roles. In this thesis, we investigate novel sugar-backbone modified nucleic acids with application potential in medicine and biotechnology, characterized by either a chiral phosphorus atom or a chiral acyclic pseudosugar moiety. Given the current limitations in stereocontrolled synthesis methods for many chiral unnatural nucleic acids and the scarcity of structural information available for these polymers, we developed stereocontrolled synthetic strategies to access the corresponding building blocks in enantiomerically pure form and investigated how their stereochemistry influences nucleic acid structure and function.