By performing single molecule stretching experiments with optical tweezers, we have studied the changes in the mechanical properties of DNA-cisplatin complexes as a function of some variables of interest such as the drug diffusion time and concentration in the sample. We propose a model to explain the behavior of the persistence length as a function of the drug concentration, extracting the binding data from pure mechanical measurements. Such analysis has allowed us to show that cisplatin binds cooperatively to the DNA molecule. In addition, DNA compaction by the action of the drug was also observed under our experimental conditions by studying the kinetics of some mechanical properties such as the radius of gyration and the end-to-end distance, e.g. Crisafuli et al., Integr. Biol., 2011, xx, xxxx.

We have studied the interaction between the anticancer drug Actinomycin D (ActD) and the DNA molecule by performing single molecule stretching experiments and atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging. From the stretching experiments, we determine how the mechanical properties of the DNA-ActD complexes vary as a function of drug concentration, for a fixed DNA concentration. We have found that the persistence lengths of the complexes formed behave non-monotonically: at low concentrations of ActD they are more flexible than the bare DNA molecule and become stiffer at higher concentrations. On the other hand, the contour length increases monotonically as a function of ActD concentration. Using a two-sites quenched disorder statistical model recently developed by us, we were able to extract chemical parameters such as the intrinsic binding constant and the degree of cooperativity from these pure mechanical measurements, thus performing a robust characterization of the interaction. The AFM images, otherwise, were used to measure the bending angle size distribution that ActD introduces on the double-helix structure and the average number of bendings per DNA molecule as a function of drug concentration, two quantities that cannot be determined from the stretching experiments.

We have performed single molecule stretching experiments and dynamic light scattering (DLS) in order to characterize the interaction between the DNA molecule and the fluorescent stain GelRed. The results from single molecule stretching show that the persistence length of the DNA-GelRed complexes increases as the ligand concentration increases up to some critical concentration, then decreasing for higher concentrations. The contour length of the complexes, on the other hand, increases monotonically as a function of GelRed concentration, suggesting that intercalation is the main binding mechanism. In order to characterize the physical chemistry of the interaction, we use the McGhee-von Hippel binding isotherm to extract the physicochemical parameters of the interaction from the contour length data. Such analysis has allowed us to conclude that the GelRed stain is in fact a bis-intercalator. In addition, DLS experiments were performed to study the changes of the effective size of the DNA-GelRed complexes, measured by the hydrodynamic radius, as a function of ligand concentration. We found a qualitative agreement between the results obtained from the two techniques by comparing the behaviors of the hydrodynamics radius and the radius of gyration, since this last quantity can be expressed as a function of mechanical parameters determined from the stretching experiments.

We propose a method to determine the DNA-cisplatin binding mechanism peculiarities by monitoring the mechanical properties of these complexes. To accomplish this task, we have performed single molecule stretching experiments by using optical tweezers, from which the persistence and contour lengths of the complexes can be promptly measured. The persistence length of the complexes as a function of the drug total concentration in the sample was used to deduce the binding data, from which we show that cisplatin binds cooperatively to the DNA molecule, a point which so far has not been stressed in binding equilibrium studies of this ligand.

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