Noncovalent interactions between cisplatin and graphene prototypes

Abstract

Cisplatin (CP) has been widely used as an anticancer drug for more than 30 years despite severe side effects due to its low bioavailability and poor specificity. For this reason, it is paramount to study and design novel nanomaterials to be used as vectors capable to effectively deliver the drug to the biological target. The CP square-planar geometry, together with its low water solubility, suggests that it could be possibly easily adsorbed on 2D graphene nanostructures through the interaction with the related highly conjugated π-electron system. In this work, pyrene has been first selected as the minimum approximation to the graphene plane, which allows to properly study the noncovalent interactions determining the CP adsorption. In particular, electronic structure calculations at the MP2C and DFT-SAPT levels of theory have allowed to obtain benchmark interaction energies for some limiting configurations of the CP-pyrene complex, as well as to assess the role of the different contributions to the total interaction: it has been found that the parallel configurations of the aggregate are mainly stabilized around the minimum region by dispersion, in a similar way as for complexes bonded through π-π interactions. Then, the benchmark interaction energies have been used to test corresponding estimations obtained within the less expensive DFT to validate an optimal exchange-correlation functional which includes corrections to take properly into account for the dispersion contribution. Reliable DFT interaction energies have been therefore obtained for CP adsorbed on graphene prototypes of increasing size, ranging from coronene, ovalene, and up to C H . Finally, DFT geometry optimizations and frequency calculations have also allowed a reliable estimation of the adsorption enthalpy of CP on graphene, which is found particularly favorable (about -20 kcal/mol at 298 K and 1 bar) being twice that estimated for the corresponding benzene adsorption. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Nanomaterial-mediated autophagy: coexisting hazard and health benefits in biomedicine

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Spectroscopy of a rotating hydrogen molecule in carbon nanotubes

“…Ab-initio intermolecular interaction theory allows an accurate description of van der Waals (vdW)-dominated interactions of molecules with carbon nanostructures. 7,8,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Recent options are mixed schemes combining second-order Möller-Plesset perturbation theory with the coupled-cluster approach, 16,17 as well as non-periodic implementations of the incremental method 24 applied at coupled-cluster level [25][26][27][28][29] with periodic calculations using dispersionless density functional theory. 28,[30][31][32] An alternative methodological protocol 8 combines DFT-based symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT), which is used to derive the parameters of potential models describing the gas adsorption to the carbon material, with an ad hoc-developed adsorbate wave function treatment.…”