Scheme 1.
Truncation of parent aptamer R1 to generate variants with shorter lengths. Twenty bases were removed from parent aptamer R1 to design R1.1, followed by 17 bases from the 3’- end of R1.1 to design R1.2. Finally, 7 more bases were removed from the 3’-end of R1.2 to generate R1.3. Arrow indicates truncated position in each sequence. A complete list of sequences can be found in Scheme S1. The 2-dimensional structures were obtained from http://rna.urmc.rochester.edu/RNAstructureWeb/index.html.