The terminal phosphate in d(pGpG) reduces self-association

An investigation of the self-association behavior of 2'-deoxy[5'-phosphate-guanylyl-(3'-5')-guanosine] (d(pGpG)) in the presence of Na+ and K+ ions has been carried out by 1H and 31P NMR and FTIR spectroscopy. A comparison has been made of the self- association behavior of d(pGpG) with that of the related dinucleotide d(GpG), which has been shown to form extended structures based on stacked G-tetrads. Chemically, d(pGpG) monomer differs from d(GpG) only by the addition of a phosphate at the 5'-OH of the sugar residue. It was found that the addition of the second phosphate interferes with self-association. A suitable counterion is all that is required by d(GpG) to induce the formation of large super structures, but for d(pGpG) a large excess of salt is needed to produce the same effect. However, once self-association occurs, d(pGpG) forms similar structures to d(GpG) and has nearly the same properties. For both compounds, the K+ ion induces a more stable structure than the Na+ ion. The 31P NMR chemical shift ranges of d(pGpG) were consistent with the reported data for a phosphodiester and terminal phosphate. The small change in the chemical shift of the terminal phosphate with increasing temperature suggests that no major change in the terminal phosphate conformation occurred upon self-association. It was concluded that the terminal phosphate did not result in steric hindrance to self-association, but that interference to self-association was due to electrostatic repulsion effects.