Patent attributes
The present invention provides methods and compositions for expanding the scope of chemical reactions that can be performed during nucleic acid-templated organic syntheses. In particular, nucleic acid-templated chemistries are used to produce reaction intermediates attached to an oligonucleotide that can be used to identify the reaction intermediates and/or the resulting reaction products. The reaction intermediates then are reacted with free reactants (for example, reactants that are difficult or impractical to couple to an oligonucleotide) to produce a reaction product. This approach expands the scope of reagents useful in nucleic acid-templated syntheses to reagents that do not need to be or cannot be tethered to an oligonucleotide. The reagents, however, still permit the synthesis of reaction products attached to oligonucleotides that can be used to identify the reaction products.