Programmable Oligonucleotide-Peptide Complexes: Synthesis and Applications

Nucleic acids form biological blueprint and polypeptides assist life activities, both of which are indispensable to organisms. Recently, oligonucleotide-peptide complexes (OPCs) have shown great potential in biomedicine, material chemistry and other fields due to their considerable stability and programmability. It remains a huge challenge to stably and facilely constructing OPCs that also limits the wide applications. This tutorial review first summarizes the synthesis strategies of OPC conjugation and the corresponding characteristics in detail, then gives examples of the applications of OPCs, and finally presents a prospective overview on challenges and future perspectives of OPCs. This review aims to help researchers understand the current situation and challenges in this field, thereby furthering interests in developing novel OPC synthesis techniques.