A review: Fabrications, detections and applications of peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) microarray

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is a mimic of DNA that shows a high chemical stability and can survive the enzymatic degradation of nucleases and proteases. The superior binding properties of PNA enable the formation of PNA/DNA or PNA/RNA duplex with excellent thermal stability and unique ionic strength effect. The introduction of microarray makes it possible to achieve accurate, high throughput parallel analysis of DNA or RNA with a highly integrated and low reagents consuming device. This powerful tool expands the applications of PNA in genotyping based on single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection, the monitoring of disease-related miRNA expression and pathogen detection. This review paper discusses the fabrications of PNA microarrays through in situ synthesis strategy or spotting method by automatic devices, the various detection methods for the microarray-based hybridization and the current applications of PNA microarrays. •Fabrications of PNA microarray through in situ synthesis and spotting method are discussed.•Detection methods for PNA microarray-based hybridization are described.•Current applications of PNA microarray and modified PNA microarray are reviewed.