Gna!

Gna! is a centralized location where software developers can develop, distribute and maintain free software.

History

In the beginning, GNA (recursively acronymed "Gna's Not Axis"), was an association formed by Loïc Dachary for the distribution of free software.

On the 12 April 2001, GNA turned into the French chapter of Free Software Foundation (FSF).

At the end of 2003, the GNU Savannah server was replaced by FSF after a security compromise. A dispute broke out between FSF, who owned Savannah, and Savannah's maintainers, including developers of the Savannah software over the levels of administration the FSF should be given. FSF announced that it was going to switch to GForge, leaving frayed tempers among the developers, as result of a conflict about Savannah maintainers' role.

In January 2004, Loïc Dachary (who also started GNU Savannah) and several former GNU Savannah maintainers set up "Gna!" as a continuation of the Savannah project, but hosted on servers owned by the Free Software Foundation France. Gna! is paradoxically recursively acronymed "Gna's Not an Acronym!". It is managed by a self-organized team, supported by Free Software Foundation France.

GNA

GNA, gna or similar may refer to:

Glycol nucleic acid

Glycol nucleic acid (GNA) is a polymer similar to DNA or RNA but differing in the composition of its "backbone". GNA is not known to occur naturally; they are synthesized chemically.

The 2,3-dihydroxypropylnucleoside analogues were first prepared by Ueda et al. (1971). Soon thereafter it was shown that phosphate-linked oligomers of the analogues do in fact exhibit hypochromicity in the presence of RNA and DNA in solution (Seita et al. 1972). The preparation of the polymers was later described by Cook et al. (1995, 1999) and Acevedo and Andrews (1996). The GNA-GNA self-pairing described by Zhang and Meggers is however novel, and the specificity of interaction well-demonstrated.

DNA and RNA have a deoxyribose and ribose sugar backbone, respectively, whereas GNA's backbone is composed of repeating glycol units linked by phosphodiester bonds. The glycol unit has just three carbon atoms and still shows Watson-Crick base pairing. The Watson-Crick base pairing is much more stable in GNA than its natural counterparts DNA and RNA as it requires a high temperature to melt a duplex of GNA. It is possibly the simplest of the nucleic acids, so making it a hypothetical precursor to RNA.