Chemical nucleases

The reactivities and applications of abiological, nucleolytic, redox-active coordination complexes are examined. Many oxidative scission reagents have been described, but no robust chemical reaction has yet been discovered that cleaves the phosphodiester bond of RNA or DNA by a hydrolytic mechanism at a rate that would make it useful to study nucleic acid structure-function relationships or to incorporate it into the design of a synthetic restriction endonuclease.