Importance of hydrophobic interactions in the single-chained cationic surfactant-DNA complexation

The goal of this work was to understand the key factors determining the DNA compacting capacity of single-chained cationic surfactants. Fluorescence, zeta potential, circular dichroism, gel electrophoresis and AFM measurements were carried out in order to study the condensation of the nucleic acid r...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: López-López, Manuel, López-Cornejo, María del Pilar, Martín, Victoria I., Ostos Marcos, Francisco José, Checa Rodríguez, Cintia, Prados Carvajal, Rosario, Lebrón Romero, José Antonio, Huertas Sánchez, Pablo, Moyá Morán, María Luisa
Format: article
Status:Versión aceptada para publicación
Publication Date:2018
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repository:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/166756
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/166756
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcis.2018.03.048
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Charge inversion
Compaction
Complexation
Critical micelle concentration
DNA
Single-chained cationic surfactants
Description
Summary:The goal of this work was to understand the key factors determining the DNA compacting capacity of single-chained cationic surfactants. Fluorescence, zeta potential, circular dichroism, gel electrophoresis and AFM measurements were carried out in order to study the condensation of the nucleic acid resulting from the formation of the surfactant-DNA complexes. The apparent equilibrium binding constant of the surfactants to the nucleic acid, Kapp, estimated from the experimental results obtained in the ethidium bromide competitive binding experiments, can be considered directly related to the ability of a given surfactant as a DNA compacting agent. The plot of ln(Kapp) vs. ln(cmc), cmc being the critical micelle concentration, for all the bromide and chloride surfactants studied, was found to be a reasonably good linear correlation. This result shows that hydrophobic interactions mainly control the surfactant DNA compaction efficiency