Comprehensive analysis of the atenolol - DNA complex by viscometric, molecular docking and spectroscopic techniques

This paper discusses multi-spectroscopic and molecular docking analysis of the interaction between atenolol (ATN) and deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) using alizarin (ALZ) as a spectroscopic probe. ATN is a β₁ -receptor antagonist belonging to the β-blocker class of molecules. Experimental findings that were based on different spectroscopic analysis, melting studies, viscometric analysis, ¹ H nuclear magnetic resonance and circular dichroism studies revealed the presence of a grove-binding mode. The effect of ionic strength was also studied, and observations suggested that electrostatic interaction also played a minor role during interaction. Molecular docking analysis suggested that the dominant force for the grove-binding phenomenon was hydrogen bonding between the 24-H residue of ATN and O of the 10-G residue, and the 40-H residue of ATN and N of the 17-A base residue. Competitive binding study of the ALZ-DNA complex with ATN showed that, despite an increase in the amount of ATN in the ALZ-DNA complex, the overall absorbance remained unchanged. The decrease in fluorescence in the ALZ-DNA system may be due to new non-fluorescent ATN-DNA-ALZ complex formation.