Platinum-based anticancer drugs act therapeutically by forming DNA adducts, but suffer from severe toxicity and resistance problems, which have not been overcome in spite of decades of research. And yet defined chromatin targets have generally not been considered in the drug development process. Here we designed novel platinum-intercalator species to target a highly deformed DNA site near the n...

Bifunctional enzymes find a wide application as a monitoring facility and a potential biocatalyst in molecular biology and biotechnology. Recombination of natural enzymes to a bifunctional fusion offers valuable tools, but the functional and structural instability of artificial fusion enzymes remains to be solved. Based on structural traits of microbial D-hydantoinase, we attempted to construct...

To gain insight into the diversity and origins of antibiotic resistance genes, we identified resistance genes in the soil in an apple orchard using functional metagenomics, which involves inserting large fragments of foreign DNA into Escherichia coli and assaying the resulting clones for expressed functions. Among 13 antibiotic-resistant clones, we found two genes that encode bifunctional prote...

Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA 22:6n-3) and salicylate are both known to exert anti-inflammatory effects. This study investigated the effects of a novel bifunctional drug compound consisting of DHA and salicylate linked together by a small molecule that is stable in plasma but hydrolyzed in the cytoplasm. The components of the bifunctional compound acted synergistically to reduce inflammation mediat...

Cobalt based catalysts are promising bifunctional electrocatalysts for both oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reactions (ORR and OER) in unitized regenerative fuel cells (URFCs) operating with alkaline electrolytes. Here we report a hybrid composite of cobalt nanoparticles embedded in nitrogen-doped carbon (Co/N-C) via a solvothermal carbonization strategy. With the synergistic effect arisi...

Phenolic compounds derived from biomass are important feedstocks for the sustainable production of hydrocarbon biofuels. Hydrodeoxygenation is an effective process to remove oxygen-containing functionalities in phenolic compounds. This paper reported a simple method for producing hydrocarbons by liquefying biomass and upgrading liquefied products. Three phenolic compounds fractions (1#, 2#, and...

Exonuclease III has been shown previously to reveal the binding sites of the antitumor drug cis-diamminedichloroplatinum(II) on DNA. Pretreatment of the same DNA with the intercalator ethidium bromide causes new platinum binding sites to be detected by the exonuclease III method. In particular, a 5'd(G6-D-G2)3' sequence in a 165-base-pair restriction fragment of plasmid pBR322 becomes a preferr...

DNA stretching in the nucleosome core can cause dramatic structural distortions, which may influence compaction and factor recognition in chromatin. We find that the base pair unstacking arising from stretching-induced extreme minor groove kinking near the nucleosome centre creates a hot spot for intercalation and alkylation by a novel anticancer compound. This may have far reaching implication...

We report here the details of G4-FID (G-quadruplex fluorescent intercalator displacement), a simple method aiming at evaluating quadruplex-DNA binding affinity and quadruplex- over duplex-DNA selectivity of putative ligands. This assay is based on the loss of fluorescence upon displacement of thiazole orange from quadruplex- and duplex-DNA matrices. The original protocol was tested using variou...

Cryptolepine, the main alkaloid present in the roots of Cryptolepis sanguinolenta, presents a large spectrum of biological properties. It has been reported to behave like a DNA intercalator with a preference for GC-rich sequences. In this study, dialysis competition assay and mass spectrometry experiments were used to determine the affinity of cryptolepine and neocryptolepine for DNA structures...