Quaternary protoberberine alkaloids and their interaction to DNA


Petra JAROSOVA^1, Andrea SLANINKOVA^1, Petr TABORSKY^1, Ondrej PES^2


^1Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlářská 2, 611 37 Brno, Czech
Republic

^2Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Kamenice 5, 62500 Brno,
Czech Republic

Email of presenting author: 408846@mail.muni.cz


Non-canonical DNA secondary structures have gained interest in recent years. One of these
structures is the G-quadruplex (GQ) which is present in several protoncogenic-DNA promoters and
thus participates in biological processes such as replication, transcription and translation.
Quaternary protoberberine and tetrahydroprotoberberine alkaloids (corysamine, coptisine and
stylopine), which are supposed to selectively bind these structures, have been tested. Influence of
selected alkaloids on stability of double-stranded DNA and noncanonical form of DNA was observed by
determining association constants of alkaloid-DNA complexes using two spectroscopic methods −
molecular absorption spectrometry and fluorescence spectrometry. Furthermore, effect of given
alkaloids on melting temperature of these DNA structures was determined by using CD spectrometry.
Competitive dialysis was performed for affinity comparison of certain alkaloids to different DNA
structures including G-quadruplexes. These measurements have confirmed results obtained by CD
spectrometry and extended the knowledge, that investigated alkaloids prefer interaction with
G-quadruplexes in comparison to dsDNA and ssDNA.



Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Specific University Research Grant (MUNI/A/0910/2017) provided by
the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic in the year 2017.