Molecular Dynamics Investigations of the Local Structural Characteristics of DNA Oligonucleotides: Studies of Helical Axis Deformations, Conformational Sequence Dependence and Modified Nucleoside Perturbations.

The present DNA studies investigate the local structure of DNA oligonucleotides in order to characterize helical axis deformations, sequence dependent fine structure and modified nucleoside perturbations of selected oligonucleotide sequences. The molecular dynamics method is used to generate an ensemble of energetically feasible DNA conformations which can then be analyzed for dynamical conformational properties, some of which can be compared to experimentally derived values. A theory and graphical presentation for the analysis of helical deformations of DNA based on the configurational statistics of polymers, called "Persistence Analysis", was designed. The results of the analysis on prototype forms, static crystal structures and two solvated MD simulations of the sequence d(CGCGAATTCGCG) indicate that all of the expected features of bending can be sensitively and systematically identified by this approach. Comparison of the relative performance of three molecular dynamics potential functions commonly used for dynamical modeling of biological macromolecules; CHARMm, AMBER and GROMOS was investigated via in vacuo MD simulations on the dodecamer sequence d(CGCGAATTCGCG)_2 with respect to the conformational properties of each dynamical model and their ability to support A and B families of DNA. Vacuum molecular dynamics simulations using the CHARMm force field carried out on simple homo- and heteropolymers of DNA led to the conclusion that sequence dependent fine structure appears to be well defined for adenine-thymine rich sequences both at the base pair and base step level whereas much of the the fine structure found in cytosine -guanine rich sequences appears to be context dependent. The local conformational properties of the homopolymer poly (dA) -poly (dT) revealed one dynamical model which was found in general agreement with fiber models currently available. Investigation of the relative structural static and dynamical effect of the misincorporation of Arabinoslycytosine (araC), a potent antileukemic drug, entailed three solvated molecular dynamics simulations in which the structural modifications of deoxyribose cytosine to arabinosyl cytosine, ribose cytosine or thymine indicate that the araC substitution induces a mild perturbation to the structure.