First developed in the Shaw

Barbara Ramsay Shaw

Barbara Ramsay Shaw is the William T. Miller Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Duke University, having been appointed to that position in 2006. She is known for her work on boranophosphates, using them to study the chemical reactivity of DNA, for applying synthetic chemistry to gene...

 lab in 1990, boranophosphates have great potential as therapeutic and diagnostic agents, as the modification confers many unique properties. (Sood 1990) The boranophosphate resembles the normal phosphate

Phosphate

A phosphate, an inorganic chemical, is a salt of phosphoric acid. In organic chemistry, a phosphate, or organophosphate, is an ester of phosphoric acid. Organic phosphates are important in biochemistry and biogeochemistry or ecology. Inorganic phosphates are mined to obtain phosphorus for use in...

 in that the negative charge is retained; however, the polarity of the molecule

Molecule

A molecule is an electrically neutral group of at least two atoms held together by covalent chemical bonds. Molecules are distinguished from ions by their electrical charge...

 changes because the negative charge is localized on the remaining non-bridging oxygen

Oxygen

Oxygen is the element with atomic number 8 and represented by the symbol O. Its name derives from the Greek roots ὀξύς and -γενής , because at the time of naming, it was mistakenly thought that all acids required oxygen in their composition...

. (He 1998) Partitioning experiments have demonstrated that boranophosphates are more lipophilic than normal phosphates; (Shaw 2000) this could allow for increased cellular uptake and targeted delivery. In addition, boranophosphates have increased nuclease resistance without affecting activation of RNase H cleavage of RNA

RNA

Ribonucleic acid , or RNA, is one of the three major macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life....

in RNA: boranophosphate hybrids. (Shaw 2000)