Abstract: The present invention relates to methods of treating and diagnosing oxidative damage in a subject comprising administering an agent that binds oxidized extracellular nucleic acid, and methods of treating diseases and conditions in a subject comprising administering an adjuvant therapy comprising an agent that binds oxidized extracellular nucleic acid. The oxidized fraction of extracellular DNA can also be detected through electrochemical methods or by mass-spectrometry.

Abstract: Described are methods and systems for designing target-specific oligonucleotides of L-length. The method comprises a) parsing a polynucleotide target into overlapping sequences of N-length nucleotides, creating a kernel set; b) performing step a) reiteratively for each target until each it is associated with its own kernel set; c) removing N-length kernels from the kernel sets which are redundant; d) concatenating X-length nucleotide suffixes to each N-length nucleotide kernel to create L-length oligonucleotide sets; e) ordering L-length nucleotides within each set of step d) by their nucleotide position within the target; f) retaining or rejecting an L-length oligonucleotide, based on the presence or absence of each of the X consecutive and overlapping N-length kernels; and g) performing step f) reiteratively.

Abstract: A method and system for identifying unique polynucleotide sequences within a larger polynucleotide sequence is provided which is useful for designing unique polynucleotides for any purpose, e.g., as probes, primers, transcription or translation modulators, siRNAs, capture labels, ribozymes, etc. The polynucleotides can be used in silencing or interference RNA (“siRNA”) technologies, polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”), including quantitative PCR, microarrays, and any hybridization strategy that utilizes oligonucleotides to detect or label nucleic acids. The method can be used to validate and assess the specificity and off-target annealing of target-specific polynucleotides (e.g., siRNAs) that have been generated by other methods.