Are you sure you want to leave this community? Leaving the community will revoke any permissions you have been granted in this community.
Thrombin-binding aptamer (TBA) is a DNA 15-mer of sequence 5'-GGT TGG TGT GGT TGG-3' that folds into a G-quadruplex structure linked by two T-T loops located on one side and a T-G-T loop on the other. These loops are critical for post-SELEX modification to improve TBA target affinity. With this goal in mind we synthesized a T analog, 5-(indolyl-3-acetyl-3-amino-1-propenyl)-2'-deoxyuridine (W) to substitute one T or a pair of Ts. Subsequently, the affinity for each analog was determined by biolayer interferometry. An aptamer with W at position 4 exhibited about 3-fold increased binding affinity, and replacing both T4 and T12 with W afforded an almost 10-fold enhancement compared to native TBA. To better understand the role of the substituent's aromatic moiety, an aptamer with 5-(methyl-3-acetyl-3-amino-1-propenyl)-2'-deoxyuridine (K; W without the indole moiety) in place of T4 was also synthesized. This K4 aptamer was found to improve affinity 7-fold relative to native TBA. Crystal structures of aptamers with T4 replaced by either W or K bound to thrombin provide insight into the origins of the increased affinities. Our work demonstrates that facile chemical modification of a simple DNA aptamer can be used to significantly improve its binding affinity for a well-established pharmacological target protein.
Pubmed ID: 29684204
Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.
A commercial antibody supplier and provider of various services.
View all literature mentionsSoftware for macromolecular model building, model completion and validation, and protein modelling using X-ray data. Coot displays maps and models and allows model manipulations such as idealization, rigid-body fitting, ligand search, Ramachandran plots, non-crystallographic symmetry and more. Source code is available.
View all literature mentionsA structure-validation web application which provides an expert-system consultation about the accuracy of a macromolecular structure model, diagnosing local problems and enabling their correction. MolProbity works best as an active validation tool (used as soon as a model is available and during each rebuild/refine loop) and when used for protein and RNA crystal structures, but it may also work well for DNA, ligands and NMR ensembles. It produces coordinates, graphics, and numerical evaluations that integrate with either manual or automated use in systems such as PHENIX, KiNG, or Coot.
View all literature mentions