Artificial metal base pairs have become increasingly important in nucleic acids chemistry due to their high thermal stability, water solubility, orthogonality to natural base pairs, and low cost of production. These interesting properties combined with ease of chemical and enzymatic synthesis have prompted their use in several practical applications, including the construction of nanomolecular devices, ions sensors, and metal nanowires. Chemical synthesis of metal base pairs is highly efficient and enables the rapid screening of novel metal base pair candidates. However, chemical synthesis is limited to rather short oligonucleotides and requires rather important synthetic efforts. Herein, we discuss recent progress made for the enzymatic construction of metal base pairs that can alleviate some of these limitations. First, we highlight the possibility of generating metal base pairs using canonical nucleotides and then describe how modified nucleotides can be used in this context. We also provide a description of the main analytical techniques used for the analysis of the nature and the formation of metal base pairs together with relevant examples of their applications.

中文翻译：

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金属介导的核酸碱基对的酶促构建。

人工金属碱基对由于其高热稳定性、水溶性、与天然碱基对的正交性以及生产成本低，在核酸化学中变得越来越重要。这些有趣的特性与化学和酶促合成的简便性相结合，促使它们在多种实际应用中得到使用，包括纳米分子器件、离子传感器和金属纳米线的构建。金属碱基对的化学合成效率很高，可以快速筛选新的金属碱基对候选物。然而，化学合成仅限于相当短的寡核苷酸，需要相当重要的合成工作。在此，我们讨论了最近在金属碱基对的酶促构建方面取得的进展，这些进展可以减轻其中一些限制。第一的，我们强调了使用规范核苷酸生成金属碱基对的可能性，然后描述了如何在这种情况下使用修饰的核苷酸。我们还提供了用于分析金属碱基对的性质和形成的主要分析技术及其应用的相关示例。