1 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Concordia University, Montréal, Québec H4B 1R6, Canada.
2 Department of Biochemistry, Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology, and Center for Structural Biology, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, United States.

Over the past 25 years, the acceleration of achievements in the development of oligonucleotide-based therapeutics has resulted in numerous new drugs making it to the market for the treatment of various diseases. Oligonucleotides with alterations to their scaffold, prepared with modified nucleosides and solid-phase synthesis, have yielded molecules with interesting biophysical properties that bind to their targets and are tolerated by the cellular machinery to elicit a therapeutic outcome. Structural techniques, such as crystallography, have provided insights to rationalize numerous properties including binding affinity, nuclease stability, and trends observed in the gene silencing. In this review, we discuss the chemistry, biophysical, and structural properties of a number of chemically modified oligonucleotides that have been explored for gene silencing.