Some New Aspects of Aetinomycin D—Nucleic Acid Binding
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Crystallographic analyses of drug-oligonucleotide complexes have yielded many insights into how small molecules affect the structure of DNA (Berman and Young 1981). To date, the most widely used model systems have been 2:1 complexes between dinucleoside phosphates and small planar molecules. With two important exceptions (Seeman et al. 1975; Takusagawa et al. 1982), all the self-complementary sequences have formed intercalative complexes, thus providing a rich data base for the understanding of the structural details of this mode of interaction.
DNA is the cellular target for aetinomycin D (AMD) (Fig. 1), a widely used biochemical tool (Goldberg and Friedman 1971; Kersten and Kersten 1974) with specific chemotherapeutic activity (Farber 1966). However, its exact mode of binding is not as well understood as those of more simple molecules. For example, solution studies of complexes between AMD and a variety of oligonucleotides have indicated that its planar chromophore ring intercalates between base pairs...
