Fast interstrand cross-linking of cisplatin-DNA monoadducts compared with intrastrand chelation: a kinetic study using hairpin-stabilized duplex oligonucleotides.

The antitumor drug cisplatin forms two kinds of guanine-guanine cross-links with DNA: intrastrand, occurring mainly at GG sites, and interstrand, formed at GC sites. The former are generally more abundant than the latter, at least in experiments with linear duplex DNA. The formation of interstrand cross-links requires partial disruption of the Watson-Crick base pairing, and one could therefore expect the cross-linking reaction to be rather slow. In contrast with this expectation, kinetic measurements reported here indicate that interstrand cross-linking is as fast as intrastrand, or even faster. We have investigated the reactions between two hairpin-stabilized DNA duplexes, containing either a d(TGCA)(2) sequence (duplex TGCA) or a d(G(1)G(2)CA)-d(TG(3)CC) sequence (duplex GGCA), and the diaqua form of cisplatin, cis-Pt(NH(3))(2)(H(2)O)(2), in an unbuffered solution kept at pH 4.5 +/- 0.1 and 20 degrees C. Using HPLC as the analytical method, we have determined the platination (first step) and chelation (second step) rate constants for these reaction systems. Duplex TGCA, in which the two guanines are quasi-equivalent, is found to be platinated very slowly (k=0.5 +/- 0.1M(-1)s(-1)) and to form the final interstrand cross-link very rapidly (k=13 +/- 3 x 10(-3) s(-11)). For GGCA, we find that G(1) is platinated rapidly (k=32 +/- 5M(-1)s(-1)) to form a long-lived monoadduct, which is only slowly chelated (k=0.039 +/- 0.001 x 10(-3) s(-1)) by G(2) (intrastrand), while G(2) is platinated one order of magnitude more slowly than G(1) (k=2.0 +/- 0.5M(-1)s(-1)) and chelated fairly rapidly both by G(1) (intrastrand: k=0.4 +/-0.1 x 10(-3) s(-1)) and G(3) (interstrand: k=0.2 +/- 0.1 x 10(-3) s(-1)); finally, G(3) is platinated at about the same rate as G(2) (k=2.4 +/- 0.5M(-1)s(-1)) and chelated very rapidly by G(2) (interstrand: k=10 +/- 4 x 10(-3) s(-1)). These results suggest that the low occurrence of interstrand cross-links in cisplatinated DNA is due to an extremely slow initial platination of guanines involved in d(GC)(2) sequences, rather than to a slow cross-linking reaction.