Oligonucleotides

Oligonucleotide Purification

Oligonucleotides are DNA or RNA polymers that are assembled in a step-wise synthesis reaction where each nucleotide is added to the chain. The synthesis typically goes between 18-40 cycles with around 21 mers being the most common length. While the synthesis chemistry is very efficient, each cycle generates little bits of impurity due to the nucleotide not being added to the chain. The result is a mixture of full length sequences and shorter sequences (truncated). Olignoucleotide purification is the process of removing these shorter sequences from the desired full length sequences.