DNA quadruplexes formed by guanine and cytosine rich DNA strands are uncommon secondary structure. They are receiving extensive attentions because the sequences which could form such conformations widely present in human genome, particularly, in telomere and promoter regions, and they show close correlation to the cancer disease and cell immortality, and are good building materials applied in nanotechnology. However, only limited numbers of NMR and crystal DNA quadruplex structures are obtained and we are far away from to understanding and manipulation of the structures for various applications due to structural diversity and complexity. Herein, we report a novel method based on label free surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), in which aluminum ions are firstly used to aggregate silver nanoparticles and produce hot spots, as results, highly sensitive and reproducible SERS spectra of DNA quadruplexes are obtained, which can provide rich structural information on the formation and structural features of DNA quadruplexes including hydrogen bonds, base stacking and glyosidic bond angles. In addition, we demonstrate how to use mass spectrometry to direct the accurate assemblies of DNA supramolecules that contains both DNA G-quadruplexes and i-motifs.

DNA quadruplexes studied by label free surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry

256th National Meeting (2018)

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