Ultrafast time-resolved infrared spectroscopy employing nanosecond temperature-jump initiation has been used to study the melting of double-stranded (ds)DNA oligomers in the presence and absence of minor groovebinding ligand Hoechst 33258. Ligand binding to ds(5′-GCAAATTTCC-3′), which binds Hoechst 33258 in the central A-tract region with nanomolar affinity, causes a dramatic increase in the timescales for strand melting from 30 to ∼250 μs. Ligand binding also suppresses premelting disruption of the dsDNA structure, which takes place on 100 ns timescales and includes end-fraying. In contrast, ligand binding to the ds(5′-GCATATATCC-3′) sequence, which exhibits an order of magnitude lower affinity for Hoechst 33258 than the A-tract motif, leads to an increase by only a factor of 5 in melting timescales and reduced suppression of premelting sequence perturbation and end-fraying. These results demonstrate a dynamic impact of the minor groove ligand on the dsDNA structure that correlates with binding strength and thermodynamic stabilization of the duplex. Moreover, the ability of the ligand to influence base pairs distant from the binding site has potential implications for allosteric communication mechanisms in dsDNA.
Two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy (2D-IR) is well established as a specialized, high-end technique for measuring structural and solvation dynamics of biological molecules. Recent technological developments now make it possible to acquire time-resolved 2D-IR spectra within seconds, and this opens up the possibility of screening-type applications comparing spectra spanning multiple samples. However, such applications bring new challenges associated with finding accurate, efficient methodologies to analyze large data sets in a timely, informative manner. Here, we demonstrate such an application by screening 2016 2D-IR spectra of 12 double-stranded DNA oligonucleotides obtained in the presence and absence of binding therapeutic molecule Hoechst 33258. By applying analysis of variance combined with principal component analysis (ANOVA-PCA) to 2D-IR data for the first time, we demonstrate the ability to efficiently retrieve the base composition of a DNA sequence and discriminate ligand-DNA complexes from unbound sequences. We further show accurate differentiation of the induced-fit and rigid-body binding modes that is key to identifying optimal binding interactions of Hoechst 33258, while ANOVA-PCA results across the full sequence range correlate directly with thermodynamic indicators of ligand-binding strength that require significantly longer data acquisition times to obtain.
In the package corr2D two-dimensional correlation analysis is implemented in R. This paper describes how two-dimensional correlation analysis is done in the package and how the mathematical equations are translated into R code. The paper features a simple tutorial with executable code for beginners, insight into the calculations done before the correlation analysis, a detailed look at the parallelization of the fast Fourier transformation based correlation analysis and a speed test of the calculation. The package corr2D offers the possibility to preprocess, correlate and postprocess spectroscopic data using exclusively the R language. Thus, corr2D is a welcome addition to the toolbox of spectroscopists and makes two-dimensional correlation analysis more accessible and transparent.
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