Some of the benefits of BNAs include ideal for the detection of short RNA and DNA targets; increase the thermal stability of duplexes; capable of single nucleotide discrimination; increases the thermal stability of triplexes; resistance to exo- and endonucleases resulting in a high stability for in vivo and in vitro applications; increased target specificity; facilitate Tm normalization; strand invasion enables detection of "hard to access" samples; compatible with standard enzymatic processes.